Any number of meanings are attached to “the Kingdom of God” as an essential element of Jesus’ teaching for Christian praxis. Used as just another slogan for political activism, in which the shade of meaning is usually reconstructing Heaven on Earth along collectivist lines, has me tossing the theological yellow flag. Another way to put this futile and often dangerous exercise is immanentizing the eschaton. This business has raised many skeptics. From St. Thomas More we received the word “utopia,”...

George Soros just donated another $6 million to Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s Super Political Action Committee, raising the total the billionaire has contributed thus far to her 2016 campaign to $7 million. Liberals and progressives who can be counted on to hyperventilate every time the Koch brothers drop a dollar into a Salvation Army drum haven’t made a peep. They’ve also been remarkably silent on other donations to Clinton’s Priorities USA SuperPac, including $5 million from Haim Saban...

The Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal recently released the 2016 Index of Economic Freedom. Despite modest gains in economic freedom worldwide, Americans have, for the eighth time in a decade, lost economic freedom. The global average score is 60.7, “the highest recorded in the 22-year history of the Index” with more than thirty countries including Burma, Vietnam, Poland, and others, received “their highest-ever Index scores.” 74 countries’ ranks declined, but they improved for 97. The least free countries included...

Tonightthe nominating process for the U.S. presidential elections officially begins when voters in Iowa meet for the caucuses. Here are five factsyou should know about what has, since 1972, been the first electoral event of each election season: 1. A caucus is a meeting of supporters or members of a specific political party or movement. To participate in the Iowa Caucus, political supporters show up at a one of the 1,681 precincts (church, school munity center, etc.) at a specific...

Where do good and e from? Some possibilities that have been proposed include evolution, reason, conscience, human nature, and utilitarianism. But as Boston College philosopher Peter Kreeft explains in the video below, none of these can be a source of objective morality. So where does e from? “The very existence of morality proves the existence of something beyond nature and beyond man,” says Kreeft. “Just as a design suggests a designer, mands suggest a mander. Moral Laws e from a...

Acton Institute and Instituto Acton have taken top spots in a new ranking. Earlier today, the University of Pennsylvania’sThink Tank & Civil Societies Program released the 2015 Global Go-To Think Tanks Report which maintains data on almost 7,000 organizations worldwide and creates a detailed report ranking them in various categories. Acton was named in five categories and Instituto Acton was named in one. See the highlights: Acton Institute is 9th (out of 90) in the Top Social Policy Think Tanks...

Enticed by the promise that their children could go to school in America, numerous Guatemalan parents paid to have their children smuggled into the U.S. No one knows how many made it across the border, but some of the children were detained by immigration official and transferred to the custody of Health and Human Services (HHS). Once in the hands of the federal government, the children should have been safe. Instead, the HHS gave at least adozen children over to...

A new report shows that global indicators of economic and political freedom declined overall in 2015, with the most serious setbacks in the area of freedom of speech and rule of law. Freedom House, an “independent watchdog organization dedicated to the expansion of freedom and democracy around the world,” released its Freedom in the World 2016 Report which included some disturbing statistics and worldwide trends, particulary as it concerns the progress made by women in some regions. The beginning of...

A new Pew Research Center survey examines how voters feel about the religiosity of presidential candidates. Here are seven figures you should know from the report: 1. More than half of Americans (51 percent) say they would be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate who does not believe in God. (This is down from 63 percent in 2007.) 2. About half of U.S. adults say it’s “very important” (27 percent) or “somewhat important” (24 percent) for a president...

Today is the official start of the primary season, which which means it’s also the time when many people officially shift into political panic mode. A lot of usare in a panic, fearing that Western civilization — or at least America’s future — is at stake and that something must be done quickly to avert disaster. But what Americans really need is to to heedthe advice of Greg Forster: Don’t panic. With all due respect to baseball, panicking is America’s...