This week’s Acton Commentary from Rev. Gregory Jensen, “Finding the Balance: Privacy and the Civil Society,” is a thoughtful reflection on the place of privacy in our modern life. I have recently made the claim that public persons, such as police officers and politicians, have a somewhat different claim to privacy than private persons. This was especially in the context of controversy over the legality of videorecording police officers while on the job. Gizmodo follows up on a previous item...

In this week’s Acton Commentary, “Lutheran World Federation Misses the Mark on Work and Wealth,” I reflect on the recently concluded general assembly of the Lutheran World Federation, held in Stuttgart. The theme of the meeting was “Give us today our daily bread,” but as I note, the assembly’s discussion of hunger, poverty, and economics lacked the proper integration of the value, dignity, and importance of work. As I contend, work is the regular means God has provided for the...

Courtesy Evangelical Outpost and the always-interesting 33 Things, here’s a video on the strangeness of the economics of incentives and punishments: The lesson here is that people in real life, body and soul, are not simple rational economic actors who respond only to material realities. We exist in the context of social webs and relationships. But we also have non-material faculties; consciences, free choice, creativity, speculative reason. Homo economicus is useful as a partial model of human behavior, but it...

In a recent post Dr. Sam Gregg outlined several arguments in the casefor returning to some kind of gold modity-based monetary system. One of the advantages to modity standard, Dr. Gregg argues, is that it “placed a high premium on economic security by reducing the uncertainty and risk that flows from fluctuations in the value of money that have nothing to do with the relative valuation of different goods and services.” One of the main determinants of trust in a...

As part of its First Principles series in Political Thought, the Heritage Foundation has published The Moral Basis for Economic Liberty by the Rev. Robert A. Sirico, president and co-founder of the Acton Institute. You can read the paper online or download as a PDF. Abstract: Today, those who defend free markets and capitalism often do so solely on managerial or technical grounds, but economic liberty needs a moral defense as well. Defense of economic liberty without reference to morality...

This week I’m attending Mises University, one of the largest and most rigorous summer courses in the Austrian School of economics (or “reality economics,” as my friend Michael McKay likes to call it). Among the various lectures, there was one in particular that struck me as particularly relevant to the work of the Acton Institute. Peter Klein, professor of economics at the University of Missouri, delivered a presentation on entrepreneurship, a large part ofthe focus of his academic work. Dr....

Compared to the Republican Party, the Democrats’ embrace of politicized religion came late. And because Democrats have only in the last 5-6 years learned how to do the God talk (thanks in large part to the efforts of Jim “The Prophet” Wallis) they can be excused as greenhorns when they whine about not getting the Church folk more mobilized for blatantly partisan efforts. But it is really annoying when those in the pews don’t go the extra mile, isn’t it?...

Bill Easterly has a brief reflection on the role of religion in global societies, a role that must be taken into account by development ‘experts.’ Speaking of his experience at an Anglican worship service in Ghana: I think it’s something about how to understand people’s behavior, you need to understand how they see themselves. A good guess is that the people in the congregation this morning, in one of the poorest regions of Ghana, do NOT see themselves primarily as...

Acton Institute has an eBook initiative underway and today we launch the first title on Amazon Kindle: Lester DeKoster’s “Work: The Meaning of Your Life.” Get yourself to the Kindle store to purchase this Christian’s Library Press work for $3.99 or to download a free sample. Soon to be added to the Kindle store is Jordan Ballor’s Ecumenical Babel, now available in hardcover from the Acton Book Shoppe and Amazon. Excerpt from “Work: The Meaning of Your Life” by Lester...

Mark Tooley follows the Prophet Wallis as he descends from the heavens in a fiery chariot, with trumpets and shouts, and goes among our youth at Wisconsin’s Lifest in The Pearly Gatecrasher. Physicists close in on the “God particle” (how small they make Him) but worry about sensitivities surrounding the name. Says one of the particle chasers: “It embarrasses me. Although I am not a believer myself, it’s a misuse of terminology that might offend some people.” Reason.tv Editor in...