When the Vatican last week issued a stinging rebuke of Fr. Jon Sobrino, a noted proponent of Liberation Theology, plaints ensued about the Church squelching “dissent.” However, as Samuel Gregg points out, Fr. Sobrino’s books were not only based on faulty economic thinking, his works placed him outside the bounds of orthodox Catholic teaching about the faith. “For Fr. Sobrino, the ‘true’ Church is to be found in the materially poor at a given time, rather than in those who...

Google recently announced that it has purchased the Trendalyzer software from Gapminder, a Swedish non-profit (HT: Slashdot). Trendalyzer is the brain-child of professor Hans Rosling, who was lecturing on international development “when it struck him that statistics were an underexploited resource, often presented in an prehensible fashion. To solve the problem he developed – along with his son – a new kind of software.” One interesting aspect of this purchase is that the software’s inventor won’t profit from its sale,...

Kevin noted earlier this week that the UK has issued a paper bill featuring Adam Smith. I also received notice this week that the Adam Smith Review is planning a conference in January of 2009, celebrating the semiquincentennial (250th) anniversary of the publication of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. The conference announcement notes that scholarship has e to appreciate the importance of Smith’s moral philosophy for his overall intellectual project.” For more on just how Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments...

Last week, Acton’s Rome office, Istituto Acton, held a conference entitled “The Religious Dimension of Human Freedom” at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. (See this Zenit piece for a brief, if unexciting, summary of the event.) In addition to the news angle concerning China, I’d like to say that all three speakers agreed on one point – the rivalry between Church and State on the claims of primary human attachments. This e as no surprise to students of...

The nearly decade-long battle between the European Union and Microsoft took another turn earlier this month, as the EU Commission offered a fresh threat to Microsoft: Submit to our demands or face stiff new penalties. The item at issue is an aspect of the 2004 ruling against Microsoft, in which “the Commission fined Microsoft and ordered it to provide petitors with information allowing them to develop workgroup server software interoperable Windows desktop operating system.” That ruling is still under appeal...

Oh, I’m sorry. I messed up that title. Gore’s newest book will be called The Assault on Reason. Here’s the book description from : A visionary analysis of how the politics of fear, secrecy, cronyism, and blind faith bined with the degration of the public sphere to create an environment dangerously hostile to reason… …We live in an age when the thirty-second television spot is the most powerful force shaping the electorate’s thinking, and America is in the hands of...

I grew up in the South. I also grew up during the Jim Crow era. I asked a lot of questions and made a lot of white folks very angry when I did. I hated the “separate but equal” hypocrisy and I was never, in my heart of hearts, sympathetic with the illogic of racism as I knew it. As a teen I was called into the senior pastor’s office and told to stop spreading racial unrest among the youth...

Coming soon to a theater near you (hopefully) – Evan Coyne Maloney’s Indoctrinate U. From the film’s website: At colleges and universities across the nation, from Berkeley and Stanford to Yale and Bucknell, the charismatic filmmaker uncovers academics who use classrooms as political soapboxes, students who must parrot their professors’ politics to get good grades, and administrators who censor diversity of thought and opinion. With flair and wit, Maloney poses tough questions to America’s academics and university administrators — who...

Kishore Jayabalan reported yesterday on the latest happenings with the Acton Institute’s office in Rome and the most recent installment of the Centesimus Annus Conference Series, “The Religious Dimension of Human Freedom.” As Kishore notes, the conference took place within the context of the spate of media attention to the religious situation in China, especially with reference to the relations between Beijing and the Vatican. Last month Acton’s director of research Samuel Gregg wrote in The Australian about the increasing...

According to published reports, China is planning on adding new censorship regulations covering blogs and webcasts (HT). President Hu Jintao says the government needs to take these steps to “purify” the Internet, leading to “a more healthy and active Internet environment,” according to the Xinhua news agency. Estimates put the number of Internet police manning the “Great Firewall of China” at 30,000-40,000. To see if those cops are looking at a particular website, test it at GreatFirewallOfChina.org. You can also...