A week ago, Dr. Samuel Gregg addressed an audience here at Acton’s Grand Rapids, Michigan office on the topic of “Europe: A Continent in Economic and Cultural Crisis.” If you weren’t able to attend, we’re pleased to present the video of Dr. Gregg’s presentation below. ...

What are the best ways to help the poor in developing countries? Answering that question is not as straightforward as you might assume, says development economist Bruce Wydick in Christianity Today. As Wydick notes, most relief and development organizations carry out self-assessments and measure impact based on self-studies, methods that are neither unbiased nor empirically rigorous. So to get a better answer to the question Wydick polled ten other top development economists. He asked them to rate, from 0 to...

[Note: Since my previous post on Christian libertarianism stirred up an interesting debate, I thought it might be worth adding one more post on the subject before we move on. I think the following thought experiment will help shed light on our previous discussion.] The medieval monk and scholar Caesarius of Heisterbach tells of hearing a lay brother praying to Jesus: “Lord,” the man declared, “if Thou free me not from this temptation I plain of Thee to Thy mother.”...

Our friends over at AEI have a wonderful website—Values & Capitalism—devoted to many of the same topics we cover here at Acton: faith, economics, poverty, the environment, society. Values & Capitalism, which is capably managed and curated by my buddy Eric Teetsel, is an excellent resource that I mend to all liberty-loving, virtue promoting Christians (i.e., all good Acton PowerBlog readers). Being a huge fan of their work I was therefore grieved to read that one of their bloggers, Jacqueline...

(HT: Catholic Culture) Note: One in six patients receives care in a Catholic hospital in the United States. February 26, 2012 What are you going to give up this Lent? By Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I. The Lenten rules about fasting from food and abstaining from meat have been considerably reduced in the last forty years, but reminders of them remain in the fast days on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday and in the abstinence from meat on all the Fridays...

In the seventeenth-century, the Dutch lawyer, magistrate, and scholar Hugo Grotius advanced Protestant natural-law thinking by grounding it in human nature rather than in the mands of God. As he claimed, “the mother of right—that is, of natural law—is human nature.” For Grotius, ifan action agrees with the rational and social aspects of human nature, it is permissible; if it doesn’t, it is impermissible. This view of law shaped his writings on jurisprudence, which in turn, had a profound influence...

What does Lent, which starts today, have to do with markets and morals (and Cuba)? Sociologist Margarita Mooney explains: Free markets are good because they are free. Free markets allow people to live by morals that lead people to almsgiving, passion, and to sometimes being willing to not consume something. munist economy leaves no room for freedom in production and consumption, and that lack of economic freedom is enforced by restricting political and religious freedom. There is nothing morally good...

Today marks the beginning of Great Lent in the Orthodox Church. Not simply a fast, it is a time for that true asceticism which, according to Fr. Georges Florovsky, “is inspired not by contempt, but by the urge of transformation.” There is something of this true asceticism, even if imperfect and plete, at the basis of all human society. One must, even to only a small extent, renounce self-will to be a member of a family, a clan, or a...

Since the North American Free Trade Agreement began to be implemented in 1994, the United States has raised farm subsidies by 300 percent and Mexican corn plain that they have little hope peting in this protected market. In this week’s Acton Commentary (published Feb. 29)Anthony Bradley writes that, “U.S. government farm subsidies create the conditions for the oppression and poor health care of Mexican migrant workers in ways that make those subsidies nothing less than immoral.”The full text of his...

In the latest addition to my Jane Austen Theorem*, Thomas Rodham makes the case for reading Jane Austen as a moral philosopher who proposes “a virtue ethics for bourgeois life, the kind of life that most of us live today.” Virtue ethics understands the good life in terms of personal moral character, of ing the kind of person who does the right thing at the right time for the right reasons. It is therefore about the fundamental ethical question, How...