Below is an excerpt from an early speech given by Calvin Coolidge to the Algonquin Club in Boston, Mass. in 1915. These remarks are included in a series of speeches Coolidge published in the book, Have Faith in Massachusetts. The speeches primarily deal with his philosophy of government, which because of his emphasis on foundational beliefs, remained consistent. In the excerpt, Coolidge quotes a “Dr. Garman,” who was a professor at Amherst College, in Amherst Mass. Coolidge graduated from the...

For Christians giving is not about equations and intensives, says Peter Heslam, it’s about a spontaneous response to the grace of a lavishly generous God: In Cape Town in 2010, this response inspired the launch of a campaign to encourage a global culture of Christian generosity. The Global Generosity Network is now establishing resources and local networks, helped by leading entrepreneurs. Such entrepreneurs understand that wealth distribution relies on wealth creation – their business thinking and practical skills generates wealth...

Rev. Robert A. Sirico, President of the Acton Institute, was in Overland Park, Kansas on April 27th to address an audience of local Acton friends and supporters. His topic was “The Moral Adventure of the Free Society.” For those who attended and would like to listen again, or for those who weren’t able to be there personally, the audio of his address is available via the audio player below. [audio: ...

France elected a new president yesterday, the socialist Francois Hollande who has vowed to rein in “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism and dramatically raise taxes on the “rich.” Voters turned out Nicholas Sarkozy, the flamboyant conservative whose five-year term was undermined by Europe’s economic crisis, his paparazzi-worthy lifestyle and bative personality. But Sarkozy’s defeat exposes “a crisis of identity and purpose that presently afflicts much of Europe’s center-right,” according to Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg in a new analysis on The American Spectator....

May 1st was the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker on the Catholic calendar, and in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI offered a short reflection on human labor when speaking to construction workers (via Whispers in the Loggia): I’m taken in mind to how, in the New Testament, in the profession of Jesus before his public ministry, the word “tecton” appears, which we translate as “carpenter,” because then homes were mostly homes of wood. But, more than a “carpenter,” it’s an...

Current debates surrounding the U.S. federal budget have turned the spotlight on subsidiarity, solidarity and mon good, all aspects of Catholic social teaching. In an article by the Catholic News Service’s Dennis Sadowski, Acton research fellow and director of media Michael Matheson Miller said, “The principles are there. They are to guide us and we are to pay attention to them. You have to affirm those principles. Where Catholics are going to disagree is in the prudential implementation of them.”...

Why do democracies struggle with debt? One reason, as John Coleman notes, is that one of the problems is that debt is essentially an intergenerational wealth transfer: Debt can often be seen, essentially, a loan from future generations to the current generation. In a democracy, some of the least represented individuals are the young or those from future generations. Young people vote less. They donate and volunteer less. And their concerns — 20, 30, or 40 years in the future...

“Can one have an off day in giving the Jefferson Lecture (an off week or month in writing it)?” asks Matthew J. Franck in reference to the recent NEH honor afforded to agrarian Wendell Berry. “I’d like to think so. For judging by the text of the lecture Berry gave in Washington at the beginning of this week, his thinking can be fairly repellent.” Titled “It All Turns on Affection,” his lecture is chiefly a catalogue of Berry’s hatreds. He...

Each year tens of thousands of mostly underdressed people spend weeks hanging out in the Nevada desert in an “annual experiment in munity dedicated to radical self-expression and radical self-reliance.” If you’re like me, the first thing es to mind when you hear about the Burning Man festival is . . . hippies. Lots and lots of hippies. But Burning Man isn’t a hippie festival. (Really, it’s not.) In fact, underneath it all, says the festival’s co-founder, Larry Harvey, is...

Albert Hahn: Dr. Kuyper's care for the little people (1905)In yesterday’s post I highlighted a pair of articles that cover the transition over the last 120 years or so in the Netherlands from an emphasis on private charitable giving to reliance upon the welfare state. In some ways this story mirrors a similar transformation in American society as described by Marvin Olasky in his landmark book, The Tragedy of American Compassion. Olasky’s work does double-duty, however, not only chronicling this...