“What could possibly go wrong with a regulatory power grab by a government agency applying an 80-year-old law to the most dynamic and innovative aspect of the world’s economy?” asks Bruce Edward Walker in this week’s Acton Commentary. The Federal Communications Commission last week voted along partisan lines for passage of network neutrality regulations. The first two attempts were both defeated in U.S. Circuit Court, and one hopes this third try meets the same fate. The latest strategy deployed by...

God has clearly given us dominion over creation, yet a variety of divisions and distortions persist. Radical environmentalists dream of a world without us, even as hyper-consumerists wield God’s call as justification for undue exploitation and self-seeking. Getting therelationship right not only impacts our stewardship, but gets to the coreof whatwe believe about God, why he created us, and whohe has called us to be.It’s no wonder, then,that Abraham Kuyper begins one of his sermons on the role of the...

I have confession to make: I don’t like conferences. I don’t like seminars or conventions, either. I also don’t like colloquiums, symposiums, forums, or summits. I love people (really, I do) and I love discussions about ideas. But something happens when you put them together into a “conference” that causes my introverted tendencies to spike. I’m just not a conference-going kinda guy. That’s probably an odd admission to make, especially in a post in which I try to convince you...

On this edition of Radio Free Acton, Acton Institute Director of International Outreach Todd Huizinga draws on his wealth of diplomatic and international experience to help us understand the history and context of the ongoing financial difficulties of the nation of Greece, and how the nature of the European Unioncontributes to the unrest we see today in parts of Europe. You can listen via the audio player below. ...

The fate of more than 200 Assyrian Christians kidnapped by ISIS in northern Syria remains unknown (19 have been released), but fears of “a slaughter of major proportions” are well founded. The Assyrian International News Agency posted a plea from an Assyrian Christian fighter with the picture you see above from the front lines of the battle against ISIS. In Tel Hurmiz our militia gave a heavy response to ISIS when they entered the village. Our fighers fought bravely, which...

The rapid rise and threat of the jihadist group Islamic State has confounded the secularist West. The idea that their motivations could truly be driven by religious ideology simply fails to register with those who view religion as an individualistic, private affair. If we are going to defeat ISIS, though, this will have to change. As Kishore Jayabalan says, it’s time to start taking the relationship between religion and politics seriously: The idea of a caliphate is, of course, very...

The end of the Civil War was five days away when Abraham Lincoln gave his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865. Yet in his speech, delivered 150 years ago today, Lincoln did not gloat about the impending victory, choosing instead to use the occasion to bring both sides of the conflict together. As Matthew S. Holland says, the speech reminds us that we must resist the poisonous temptation to see those with whom we disagree as bitter enemies even...

Lovers of freedom lost alongtimeally this week with the passing of author, journalist and intellectual M. Stanton Evans at age 80. Stephen Hayward penned a remembrance of Evans at Powerline: If you’ve never heard Stan’s deadpan midwestern baritone in person, you’ve missed a great treat, as it e across anywhere near as well in pixels. But all is not lost: there are supposedly some recordings of his greatest hits available on the Philadelphia Society website. [There are also several great...

The left’s war against genetically modified foods continues apace. Last week, the nonprofit Green America outfit boasted a victory over The Hershey Company, which has agreed to use “simpler ingredients” in its addictive Hershey’s Kisses Milk Chocolates and Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bars. Yes, “Frankenfood” fearers, the delicious GMO-derived sucrose of Hershey’s chocolate soon will be replaced with an identical product coincidentally known as sucrose. Finally, the “Sugar, Sugar” bubblegum world imagined by The Archies in 1969 has been realized as...

Is the middle-class economically stagnant? And is “middle-class” a misnomer? Should we really be talking about the bottom of the economic pile? After all, isn’t the 1% controlling everything? Cato Institute Senior Fellow Alan Reynolds says the government’s claim of middle-class stagnation is based on faulty statistics. In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Reynolds quotes Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), speaking at an AFL-CIO conference: “Since 1980, guess how much of the growth in e the [bottom] 90% got? Nothing. None....