“We have replaced charity with humanitarianism, says Michael Matheson Miller in the first of this week’s Acton Commentary, “a hollowed-out secular and materialist vision of Christian love.” Concern for the poor is at the heart of Christianity. Saint John Paul II called poverty one of the greatest moral challenges of our time, and to ignore the plight of the poor has consequences for our eternal souls. Pope Francis addressed poverty in Evangelii Gaudium: “Almost without being aware of it, we...

Rani Hong was a very young girl in rural India when her life was snatched away from her by human trafficking. In desperation, her mother allowed her to be taken away by a woman she thought she could trust, a woman who promised to care for Rami. And she did, for a while. However, the lure of money was too great and Rami was sold into human trafficking at age seven. I was taken to an area where I did...

“The Bible does say a lot of justice and the poor,” notes Kevin DeYoung, “but if we are to be convicted and motivated by truth, we must pay more careful attention to what the Bible actually does and does not say.” An example is a concept that DeYoung says can be derived from the Bible, the principle of moral proximity: The principle is pretty straightforward, but it is often overlooked: the closer the moral proximity of the poor the greater...

Wenzhou, China, is known as the “Jerusalem of the East” because of its large Christian population, a population that had, until recently, enjoyed the Sanjiang Church for worship. A massive structure, Sanjiang Church took over 12 years to build and was a site of pilgrimage for Chinese Catholics. Last week, however, the Chinese government (which had previously lauded the structure’s architecture) deemed the structure “illegal” and destroyed the entire building, bricking off massive statues to hide them from sight. The...

What was the Greece vs. Galloway case about? The short answer: The constitutionality of saying religiously specific prayers (e.g., praying in Jesus name) at government meetings and functions. The (slightly) longer answer: In the town of Greece, located in upstate New York, the Town Board sessions were opened by a prayer from local clergy, mostly leaders of Christian congregations although in a few instances members of other faith traditions offered the invocation (a Jewish man, a Baha’i leader, and a...

“Clean up your own mess. Your mother doesn’t work here.” That was a sign, printed on dot matrix printer paper, which hung in the breakroom of the McDonald’s where I worked. While that was nearly thirty years ago, I suspect that same sign is still there (though probably reprinted on a laser printer). But the idea behind it has changed. Your mother may not work at McDonalds, but pany—and others that hire low-skilled employees—are increasingly taking on the role of...

What is going on with the mass kidnappings of children in Nigeria? During the night of April 16, dozens of armed men from the terrorist group Boko Haram captured over 300 Christian girls aged 12 to 15 who were sleeping in dormitories at Chibok Government Girls Secondary School in northeast Nigeria. About 50 students managed to escape, but 276 were still being held according to Nigerian state police. The group has since captured 8 more girls. The kidnappers took the...

Yesterday, Joe Carter wrote about Boko Haram, the terrorist group that has kidnapped hundreds of girls in Nigeria from the Christian school, and is now threatening to sell them into the sex trafficking trade. Salil Shetty, Secretary General of the human rights organization Amnesty International, is calling upon the Nigerian government to initiate a transparent investigation of the girls’ kidnapping and an immediate release of the girls. The horrific abduction shows the serious nature of violations of international humanitarian and...

Christian’s Library Press has released a new translation of two treatises on exchange and usury by Thomas Cajetan (1469-1534), a Dominican theologian, philosopher, and cardinal. Although best known for mentaries on the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, Cajetan also wrote dozens of other works, including short treatises on socioeconomic problems. Published under the name On Exchange and Usury, these treatises reflect on the banking industry of the early modern era in the context of the Church’s usury doctrine, examining which transactions...

“Has the War on Drugs revived the 19th Century progressive crusade against ‘degenerates’?” asks Anthony Bradley in the second of this week’s Acton Commentary. The United States currently has over 2.3 million prisoners incarcerated in federal, state, and local jails around the country. According to an April report by the Sentencing Project, that number presents a 500 percent increase in incarcerations over the past 40 years. This increase produces “prison overcrowding and fiscal burdens on states to modate a rapidly...