Recently more than half the nation’s governors—27 states—have expressed opposition to letting Syrian refugees into their states. Many lawmakers in Congress are also considering legislation that would suspend the Syrian refugee program. Here is what you should know about the current controversy: Why is there a new concern about allowing Syrian refugees into the U.S.? According to the French government, at least one of the terrorists in the recent attack on Paris is believed to have entered the country by...

“It was the genius of the English political system to adhere to the facts of English history,” says Gertrude Himmelfarb in this week’s Acton Commentary. What Lord Acton particularly admired in the later Edmund Burke was his empirical philosophy of politics, his refusal to give way to the metaphysical abstractions, the a priori speculations, that had been insinuated into public life by the rationalists of the French Revolution. Facts, Burke had admonished, are a severe taskmaster. They prohibit the idle...

When Americans think of corruption, we tend to think of third world countries where getting anything done often requires bribing local government officials. We tend not to have such problems here; our corruption is more subtle and sophisticated, and often involves state level lawmakers. For instance, over the past few years there have seen corruption-related charges or convictions of the house or assembly speakers ofAlabama (bribery, misuse of campaign funds),Rhode Island (bribery, misuse of campaign funds),South Carolina (misuse of campaign...

We’re having an intense, often heated, debate about the reception of Syrian refugees in the United States. How do Eastern Christians see it? The Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, an Archdiocese of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East, has issued a balanced and unflinchingly critical statement on the crisis. This is a church that traces its history to apostolic times in Syria and other parts of the Middle East. Many North American Antiochians are themselves...

“I am obliged to confess,” wrote William F. Buckley, Jr. in 1963, “that I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University.” A similar sentiment seems to now be shared by a majority of the American people. A recent survey by Pew Research finds that 55 percent of the public believes “ordinary Americans” would...

Despite a decline in the number of individuals attending Mass, Catholicism in France is ing more self-confident and, surprisingly, more orthodox. Writing for the Catholic World Report, Samuel Gregg discusses the Catholic Church in France. He says that France’s néocatholiques are leading change in the European nation: Perhaps the most evident sign of this sea-change in French Catholicism is what’s called La Manif pour tous. This movement of hundreds of thousands of French citizens emerged in 2012 to contest changes...

The Acton Institute lost a great friend last week. Austin HillI first met Austin Hill at 1997 an Acton Institute, Towards a Free and Virtuous Society conference held in Connecticut. Those conferences were designed to identify young future religious leaders with great potential. We invested well with Austin, who came to numerous of our events over the years. He would a radio host, author and public speaker and was most recently producing “Austin Hill’s Big World of Small Business,” a...

Today marks the 152nd year anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Here are five facts about one of history’s most famous — and famously brief — speeches: 1. The Gettysburg Address was not written on the back of an envelope. Despite the popular legend that Lincoln wrote the speech on the train while traveling to Pennsylvania, he probably wrote about half of it before leaving the White House on November 18. 2. Much of the language and thematic content of...

Today marks the 152nd anniversary of the Gettsyburg Address, the speech given by Abraham Lincoln after the battle which left 7,000 American soldiers dead and 40,000 wounded. Given its power and permanence, it may seem strange to memorialize it by pointing to an edy film from the 1930s. But it’s one that stirs all the right sentiments. In Ruggles of Red Gap, the great Charles Laughton plays Marmaduke Ruggles, an English manservant who has been gambled away by his master...

The recent decline in oil prices is a boon for consumers but a bust for panies. Collectively, profits of the four supermajors – Royal Dutch Shell PLC; Exxon Mobil Corp.; Chevron Corp.; and BP PLC – have plummeted 70 percent in the first nine months of 2015, according to the Wall Street Journal. Despite a “precipitous drop in profits this year,” the supermajors increased stock dividends 10 percent over 2014, disbursing approximately $28 billion to shareholders. For the time being,...