“The two most powerful forces in your life are your thoughts and your words.” — Thomas McDaniels When I ponder this quote, I can’t help but think back to the teachers in my life. After all, they were the ones who taught me to read, write, think, and present ideas clearly. They equipped me to harness these “powerful forces” as I now go into the world to bless others. During Teacher Appreciation Week, it is appropriate to think about the...

Legatus, an international organization of Catholic business professionals, is celebrating its 25th year of existence. The mission of Legatus is to help its members and spouses live out their Catholic faith and to spread that faith “through good works, good ideas, and high ethical standards.” The current issue of Legatus magazine features an article by the Acton Institute’s Michael Matheson Miller, research fellow and director of Acton media. Entitled ‘Poverty, social justice, and the role of business’, Miller points out...

Over on The American, Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the University of London, argues that population change is reversing secularism and shifting the center of gravity of entire societies in a conservative religious direction: The growing Republican fertility advantage largely derives from religion. In the past, people had children for material reasons—many kids died young, and fresh hands were needed to work the land and provide for parents in their old age. Today, we live in cities and...

On May 15, Socialist Francois Hollande will be sworn in as France’s new President following elections this past weekend. According to Vatican Radio, Hollande is vowing to overturn many of current President’s Sarkozy’s economic reforms, in an attempt to relieve France’s current debt crisis. One of Hollande’s goals is to increase taxation on millionaires to 75 percent. With more than a quarter of a million French citizens already working in London, this type of heavy taxation may cause an exodus...

Virgil's Aeneas fleeing the sack of Troy with his father on his shoulders and leading his son by the hand. “Even the conventional everyday morality,” writes Vladimir Solovyov, demands that a man should hand down to his children not only the goods he has acquired, but also the capacity to work for the further maintenance of their lives. The supreme and unconditional morality also requires that the present generation should leave a two-fold legacy to the next,—in the first place,...

Is ‘fair’ trade really more fair or more just than free trade? Does fair trade create an unfair advantage that hurts the poor more than it helps? There are two different opportunities over the next few days where you can have the chance to explore this topic further. Acton will be hosting Professor Claar for an online discussion tomorrow, May 9, at 6:00pm ET. In the AU Online session of his popular lecture Fair Trade vs. Free Trade, he will...

Review of The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, by Jonah Goldberg, (New York, NY: Sentinel, 2012) With proper training, and maybe a bit of experience on the debate team, it’s easy to recognize logical fallacies in an opponent’s argument. When es to popular give and take, the sort of thing we have so much of now on opinion websites and news channels, there hasn’t been decent preparation for arguments outside the columns and blog...

When es to the presidency, there are times when historians find the need to reevaluate a president. Often it is because of a crisis, war, or other current events. I can think of no other president that needs to be reassessed more than Calvin Coolidge. Thankfully, Amity Shlaes has written a new biography of Coolidge that will be available next month. Coolidge preceded a progressive era and fought not just to shrink government, which he did successfully, but harnessed the...

Even at America’s top schools, says Peter Berkowitz, graduates leave without reading our most basic writings on the purpose of constitutional self-government: It would be difficult to overstate the significance of The Federalist for understanding the principles of American government and the challenges that liberal democracies confront early in the second decade of the 21st century. Yet despite the lip service they pay to liberal education, our leading universities can’t be bothered to require students to study The Federalist—or, worse,...

I was privileged to participate this week in a conference at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, hosted by the Division for Roman Law and Legal History, “Law and Religion: The Legal Teachings of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations.” My paper today was titled, “Natural Law and Subsidiarity in Early Modern Reformed Perspective.” In this paper I explore some of the theological context in the sixteenth century among Reformed theologians like Wolfgang Musculus, Peter Martyr Vermigli, Jerome Zanchi, and Franciscus Junius that...