This week’s Acton Commentary: Our economic life is concerned with more than just the objective exchange of goods and services. Far from being morally neutral, it is an expression of how we understand our dependence on God and neighbor and is the means by which we fulfill, or not, our obligations toward them. Both for reasons of morality as well as long term economic efficiency, we cannot overlook or minimize the centrality of personal virtue, and of a culture of...

Former Acton colleague, Jay Richards just reported that his book Money, Greed, and God has just been released in paperback. It is a thoughtful Christian analysis of the market economy and an excellent summary of the many key fallacies that plague the way we understand–or rather misunderstand–economics. He writes: My tentative title for the book had been The Christian Case for Capitalism. I had even referred to it that way for a couple of years while I was working on...

I did an interview with the Harvard Political Review several weeks ago. The story is largely a paean to secularism. Steven Pinker even takes credit for democracy as an achievement of secularists. I know. That’s the history you get from an evolutionary psychologist. To the author’s credit, I was certainly treated fairly. I only wish she’d offered more of our interview to her readers. For those who would like to read it, I have posted it in full over at...

I have close friends here in Michigan who are out of work–talented, principled, hard-working people who are either unemployed or seriously underemployed. My heart breaks for them and for everyone eager to work who has been blindsided by the current recession. Unfortunately, government policies to help sometimes make the situation worse. A recent Detroit News story offers fresh evidence, evidence suggesting that Michigan’s bloated nanny state is creating perverse incentives in the labor market, incentives that are both economically and...

Having recently finished reading Jean-François Revel’s Last Exit to Utopia – in which he excoriates leftist intellectuals for ignoring the crimes munist totalitarianism and their efforts to resurrect the deadly ideology – and having just read a few more chapters of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago over lunch, it seems providential that I would stumble across this article at City Journal on the failure of researchers to seriously dig into the now-available archives of the Soviet Union: Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile...

In another Acton Commentary this week, Research Director Samuel Gregg looked at Catholic dissenter Fr. Hans Küng, who recently published an “open letter” broadside directed at the Vatican. Küng’s letter includes the now discredited Malthusian warning about global overpopulation (see video above). The letter, writes Samuel Gregg, “shows just how much he remains an unreconstructed creature of the 1960s.” +++++++++ Hans Küng’s Malthusian Moment By Samuel Gregg In April, the world received yet another global missive from the 82-year-old Swiss...

From the Greek daily Kathimerini: Witnesses said that protestors marching past the building ignored the bank employees’ cries for help and that a handful even shouted anti-capitalist slogans. [ … ] It took a statement from President Karolos Papoulias to best sum up Greece’s dire situation and the frustration that many people are feeling with the political system. “Our country has reached the edge of the abyss,” he said. “It is everybody’s responsibility that we do not take the step...

At the Volokh Conspiracy, Todd Zywicki looks at a new article by Zeljka Buturovic and Dan Klein in Econ Journal Watch which aims to “gauge economic enlightenment based on responses to eight economic questions.” Among other things, the researchers filter the survey results for political ideology. Zywicki’s highlights: 67% of self-described Progressives believe that restrictions on housing development (i.e., regulations that reduce the supply of housing) do not make housing less affordable.51% believe that mandatory licensing of professionals (i.e., reducing...

This mentary developed out of my remarks at Acton on Tap. My years of studying and reading about the civil rights movement at Ole Miss and seminary aided in the writing of this piece: Will Tea Parties Awaken America’s Moral Culture? Tea parties are changing the face of political participation, but critics of the tea party movement point to these grassroots upstarts as “extreme,” “angry,” “racist” and even “seditious.” Yet The Christian Science Monitor reported that tea party rallies are...

We of course have a ton of content in our blog archives at the Acton Institute. Radio legend and former Detroit Tigers broadcaster Ernie Harwell passed away yesterday. The infectious joy and moral quality he exuded was so grand it is worth pointing you to a post I wrote in 2008. It has a good deal of information on Harwell, including these lines: Harwell has many thrilling encounters and prestigious awards in his long life, but his most important encounter...