For one fleeting moment in Emmanuel Macron’s speech to Congress, it seemed as though he would connect the transatlantic alliance on the firm basis of mon values. “The strength of our bonds is the source of our shared ideals,” he told lawmakers. Since 1776, the United States and France “have worked together for the universal ideals of liberty, tolerance, and equal rights.” The use of the phrase “universal values,” an ersatz substitute for Western values, preceded his assessment of the...

In the latest edition of the theological journal Themelios, Logan Dagley, Dennis Greeson, and Matthew Ng review all five volumes in the English translation series of Abraham Kuyper’s works on public theology: As the North American church moves out of a place of cultural dominance and into the cultural margins, we are faced with an important question: What is the church’s public calling? This question drove Kuyper’s life and writings, and his answers provide pelling and constructive path forward for...

What would happen if local churches came together to love and serve our cities? Upon hearing such a question, our minds are prone to imagine an assortment of “outreach ministries,” from food pantries to homeless shelters munity events to street evangelism.But while each of these can be a powerful channel for love and service in munities, what about the basic vision that precedes them? Before and beyond our tactical solutions to immediate needs, how can the church truly work together...

Alfie Evans’s father wanted his son to remain on life support and be allowed to go to the Bambino Gesù Hospital in Rome for additional treatment. Earlier today, though, the UK’s Court of Appeal—the highest court within the Senior Courts of England and Wales—denied that request and upheld a previous ruling removing life-support for the British infant. (Rev. Ben Johnson wrote about “The trial of Alfie Evans” yesterday.) In this story sounds eerily familiar, it’s because it’s similar to the...

What is the Catholic Church’s teaching on the size of government? And what is the principle of subsidiarity? Our friends atCatholicVote.orghave put together a brief video to help answer these questions. ...

Rev. Dr. James Hal Cone died last week at the age of 79. Cone was a professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary and the father of black liberation theology. In a 2008 Acton Commentary, Anthony Bradley provided a brief explanation of Cone’s system of black liberation theology and its roots in Marxism: Black liberation theologians James Cone and Cornel West have worked diligently to embed Marxist thought into the black church since the 1970s. For Cone, Marxism best...

Last weekFrench President Emmanuel Macron came to the United States for a two-day summit with President Trump and an address before Congress. As Acton senior editor Rev. Ben Johnson notes at The American Spectator, Macron’s speech before Congress reveals a deep fissure within the West about its most fundamental values—a fracture es as the West faces powerful challenges from outside its borders: Macron’s speech to Congress represents one set of values: the statist orientation of the bureaucratic EU elite. Leaving...

Yesterday, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released itsInternational Religious Freedom Reportfor 2018.A wide range of U.S. government agencies and offices use the reports for such efforts as shaping policy and conducting diplomacy. The Secretary of State also uses the reports to help determine which countries have engaged in or tolerated “particularly severe violations” of religious freedom in order to designate “countries of particular concern.” “Sadly, religious freedom conditions deteriorated in many countries in 2017, often due to...

Throughout my conservative evangelical upbringing, I was routinely encouraged to follow the call of the “five-fold ministry,” whether from the pulpit in weekly church services or the prayer altars of summer youth camps. The implications were clear: entering so-called “vocational ministry” was a higher calling than, well, everything else. Later, in my college years at a leftist Christian university, I witnessed a lopsidedness of a different sort. Instead of being prodded into global missions, I was now encouraged to “make...

Note: This is post #76 in a weekly video series on basic economics. Because of differences in national growth rates there can be large disparities in economic wealth among different countries. A poor country can not only grow, but it can do so quickly. It can catch up with developed countries at an astonishing rate. That’s the good news, says Alex Tabarrok in this video by Marginal Revolution University. The bad news is, while growth can skyrocket in some countries,...