The Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty Transatlantic website marked a milestone today: It released its first article in French. While the transatlantic website has diligently followed events in France and published an array of mentators since its launch in January 2017, until today all its articles had been published in English. This denied us access to the 275 million people worldwide who speak French. The Acton Institute takes seriously our mission to take our message of liberty, human dignity, and...

Last week, the New York State Legislature arranged a series of regulations designed to protect tenants and control rents. This action was quickly repeated by the California Assembly, which passed a rent-cap bill, both following in the footsteps of Oregon’s statewide rent control law enacted this past February. Landlords in New York City were quick to argue that the new legislation would cost local construction jobs and prevent owners from making needed repairs, leading to buildings in disrepair. Nevertheless, these...

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 e toActon University. But it...

The Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty Transatlantic website has published its second article translated into French: « Bonne nouvelle, même les socialistes aiment le marché libre! » It is a translation of the article, “Great news: Even ‘socialists’ love the free market (poll),” which notes that the same Gallup poll showing socialism’s growing popularity also finds that the vast majority of Americans trust the free market, rather than the government, to regulate the economy. Translating this into French not only...

The BBC is renowned for its educational programming, but its most valuable lesson is being presented on a global stage right now. The BBC is facing backlash for doing away with a universal beneft for the elderly and, in the process, teaching an audience of millions how government programs really work. The BBC is severely restricting a benefit that pensioners e to rely on: free TV licenses. The main beneficiary of this decision is BBC executives. Artistic license The BBC...

Senator Bernie Sanders has refused to grapple with the fact that socialist governments regularly suppress human rights and devolve into despotism, according to a social democrat from Germany. Even as Sanders proposed an economic “Bill of Rights” this week, he ignored the fact that civil liberties depend on preserving “private economic initiative,” the political scientist said. In a major speech on Wednesday afternoon, Sanders invited his audience to “ask yourself: what does it actually mean to be free?” Then he...

I was happy to be interviewed recently for The Laymen’s Lounge, a new site focused on providing everyday theology to encourage and edify Christians in everyday life. My interview is titled, “Work and the Mundane,” and I get some plugs in for resources by figures including Lester DeKoster, Abraham Kuyper, Herman Bavinck, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Many of these thinkers are influential in my own life and work, and are represented as well in my collection of essays, Get Your Hands...

We live in a strange age when good Christian men are slandered in defense of men of low character. Still, I would have never suspected to see such calumny on the Acton PowerBlog. Unfortunately, my new colleague Silvio Simonetti has used our site to assassinate the character of my friend—and Acton ally—David French. Simonetti says that French is “One of the most outspoken instigators of conspiratorial theories about the collusion between Vladimir Putin and Trump. . .” Perhaps if Simonetti...

The American science fiction author Philip K. Dick was a strange guy. In addition to being a prolific author of many science fiction classics like The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Minority Report (All these and many more adapted for film and television) he was also a prolific diarist. Many of these diary entries were edited and published as The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick in 2011. A recurring theme in these diary...

The debate surrounding David French-ism started by New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari in First Things is, in my view, less about content — or political proposals, to use another term — than about the future and, to a large extent, the recent past of the American Conservative movement. This debate is not about the benefits of the free market or whether a religiously-based moral philosophy should guide government, but about how mainstream “conservatism” lost its way and what the future...