“Christianity undergirded the development of Western liberalism (in the old, good sense of the word),” says Rich Lowry. In fact, without Christianity there would probably not be anything like what we conceive as true liberty: The indispensable role of Christianity in the creation of individual rights and ultimately of secularism itself is the subject of the revelatory new intellectual historyInventing the Individual by Larry Siedentop. Here’s hoping that President Obama gives it a quick skim before he next takes the...

This week on Radio Free Acton, I spoke with my colleague Elise Graveline Hilton about her new monographA Vulnerable World: The High Price of Human Trafficking. Human trafficking is not a pleasant subject to discuss; it can be hard to believethat in our modern world, people are still enslaved and exploited sexually or for their labor, treated as nothing more modities to be used in the pursuit of illegal profit. And yet the practice is widespread and growing, even in...

Global Democracy and freedom are under attack. Freedom House, a nonprofit organization which monitors freedom and advocates for democracy and human rights just released the 2015 “Freedom in the World” report. The results are not good. In his introduction, Arch Puddington, vice president for research says that “the condition of global political rights and civil liberties, showed an overall decline. Indeed, acceptance of democracy as the world’s dominant form of government—and of an international system built on democratic ideals—is under...

Forget the candy hearts, chocolate, the local Cineplex and bistro this weekend. St. Valentine’s Day somehow has been hijacked by Global Disinvestment Day, which means you should protest fossil fuels and encourage shareholders to submit proxy resolutions to leave oil, coal and gas resources untapped. Your significant others are guaranteed to love it because … Gaia. Behind this movement are nominally religious shareholder activists such as As You Sow, as well as the World Council of Churches, filmdom’s The Hulk...

ThroughChristian’s Library Press, the Acton Institute has publishedfour tradition-specific primers on faith, work, and economics, including Baptist, Wesleyan,Pentecostal,andReformed perspectives. Each offers a distinct contribution to the subject, and when taken together provides a rich and coherent framework forChristian stewardship. The books are part of Acton’s growingOikonomia Series. This week, Acton and CLP will be giving away plete sets of the series (that’s 4 books totalfor each winner!), including Chad Brand’s Flourishing Faith,David Wright’s How God Makes the World a Better...

“Who cares about the suffering and premature death of millions in the developing world?” asks Bruce Edward Walker in this week’s Acton Commentary.”Not religious activists agitating for fossil fuel divestment.” In another trendy move, environmentalist shareholder activists are pressuring panies in which they invest to scale back in part pletely their interests in oil, gas and coal. For example, Danielle Fugere, president and chief counsel at the As You Sow religious shareholder activist outfit, told The Guardian last month that...

On August 12, 1943, months after having been arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned, the Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to his young fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer: When I consider the state of the world, the total obscurity enshrouding our personal destiny, and my present imprisonment, our union—if it wasn’t frivolity, which it certainly wasn’t—can only be a token of God’s grace and goodness, which summon us to believe in him. We would have to be blind not...

In the latest additiontoMike Rowe’s growing catalogof pointed Facebook responses, the former Dirty Jobs host tackles a question on the minimum wage, answering a man named “Darrell Paul,” who asks: The federal minimum wage is $7.25 and hour. A lot of people think it should be raised to $10.10. Seattle now pays $15 an hour, and the The Freedom Socialist Party is demanding a $20 living wage for every working person. What do you think about the minimum wage? How...

For at least forty years, scientists and policy makers have considered addressing climate related issues by means of climate engineering, or as it monly referred to, geoengineering. A prime example is found in a story published in Newsweek that proposed (albeit with reservations) to use geoengineering to fix a climatic “problem”: Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action pensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more...

When Christians think of the majesty of God’s handiwork we tend to think of the visible aspects of nature. We agree with King David that, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1). But there are intricate and beautiful aspects of God’s creative geniusthat we don’t often think about—or don’t think about as being created by God. Take, for instance, the price system. As economist Alex Tabarrok says in the video...