The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty released an Easter week statement titled “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty.” The document outlines recent threats to religious liberty in the States and abroad while endorsing an ing “Fortnight for Freedom” to defend what it calls “the most cherished of American freedoms.” We suggest that the fourteen days from June 21—the vigil of the Feasts of St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More—to July 4, Independence...

How mon good and prosperity e from an unlikely place. An interview with Gary Stratton by Jon Hirst. Today we share an interview with Gary David Stratton, PhD, Chairman of the Christian Ministries Department at Bethel University, Teaching Pastor at Basileia Hollywood, Senior Editor at , and Director of the Hollywood Bezalel Initiative. You can follow Gary on Twitter @GaryDStratton. What happens when you mix Hollywood, the local church and academia? Few would imagine such a concoction, but that amazing...

Since your wallets are probably a bit lighter due to Tax Day here in the United States, Acton wants to help out by giving you a free e-book: Globalization, Poverty and International Development. Just follow the link, Globalization, to get our monograph from Lord Brian Griffiths delivered free to your Kindle or e-reader. This offer is available beginning at 3 a.m. EST, 4/17/12 until 3 a.m. EST, 4/19/12. ...

Schools are controlled by the government, but they serve munities with niche needs, says Paul T. Hill, founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Is there a way that education be publicly funded but privately managed? Public education struggles with two conflicting facts. First, public schools are small craft organizations that require close teamwork and constant adaptation to the unpredictable development of students. Second, they are government agencies always subject to constraints imposed through politics and legal processes. In...

The pope turns 85 today. On the website of Crisis Magazine, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg looks at this most prominent of “status-quo challengers.” While regularly derided by his critics as “decrepit” and “out-of-touch,” Benedict XVI continues to do what he’s done since his election as pope seven years ago: which is to shake up not just the Catholic Church but also the world it’s called upon to evangelize. His means of doing so doesn’t involve “occupying” anything. Instead, it...

The noir heroes like Sam Spade in “The Maltese Falcon” served as models for a generation of Americans, says David Brooks. The new generation of apolitical social entrepreneurs could learn from them too: . . .[T]he prevailing service religion underestimates the problem of disorder. Many of the activists talk as if the world can be healed if we could only insert more passion and resources into it. History is not kind to this assumption. Most poverty and suffering — whether...

As Michelle Kaffenberger points out, parents in the poorest parts of India share a concern of many Americans: Their children don’t actually learn much in the public schools. A recentEconomistarticle states that between a quarter and a third of school children in India attend private schools. In India’s cities, experts estimate as many as 85 percent of children attend private schools. According toanother report, 73 percent of families in Hyderabad’s slum areas send their children to private schools. Additionally, private...

All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I had been eager to do all along. Galatians 2:10 NIV This video is part of an extended interview with Rev. Dr. John Dickson (Director, Centre for Public Christianity and Senior Research Fellow, Department of Ancient History, Macquarie University) for The Faith Effect, a project of World Vision Australia. (HT: Justin Taylor) Update: I should also add that a useful collection of primary texts on...

Legal scholar Orin Kerr provides excerpts from the concurring opinion today in Hettinga v. United States, in which Judge Janice Rogers Brown (joined by Judge Sentelle) argues that the Supreme Court should overturn its rational basis caselaw in the economic area and return to a Lochner-era regime of judicial scrutiny for economic regulations: The practical effect of rational basis review of economic regulation is the absence of any check on the group interests that all too often control the democratic...

Subsidiarity has es shorthand for smaller government, while solidarity is now shorthand for expansive government. But as Msgr. Charles Pope explains, there is more nuance to the terms than the reductionist slogans suggest: Precise meanings have been lost – The problem that has emerged is that Catholics, and others, have taken these terms into the political arena and, as might be expected, these rather careful and nuanced Catholic terms have been reduced more to slogans, and are fast losing their...