Acton director of research Samuel Gregg offers his thoughts on last night’s GOP Roundtable in this NRO Symposium. Gregg thinks the debate offered an important alternative to the government-driven economy talk that fills the news every other night of the week. In a week in which two American economists from the non-Keynesian side of the ledger received the Nobel Prize for Economics, last night’s GOP debate gave us some insight into the depth and character of the various candidates’ mitments...

Mitt Romney’s faith made headlines again at the Values Voters Summit in D.C., where Robert Jeffress, who is the pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, proclaimed last week, “Do we want a candidate who is a good, moral person, or one who is a born-again follower of the Lord Jesus Christ?” Jeffress, who introduced Governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry before his remarks to the group, was not just proclaiming his support for Perry but signaling evangelicals to not...

mentary this week addresses the demonstrations in New York and in other cities against free enterprise and business. One of the main points I make in this piece is that “lost in the debate is the fundamental purpose of American government and the importance of virtue and a benevolent society.” Here is the list of demands by the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. It is in essence a laundry list of devastating economic schemes and handouts. Additionally, the demands are counter...

I’m at the “Whole Life Discipleship: Integrating Faith, Economics, and Work” conference today at Regent University. As I have the opportunity today, I’ll blog (and tweet) some of the lectures. First up is Stephen Grabill of the Acton Institute, and here are some highlights: He focused on three basic questions: What is political and economic freedom? How do we use Scripture in our approach to social life? What about natural law? On the first: A Christian anthropology is anti-revolutionary in...

I was fortunate to attend some of “Reagan: A Centenary Retrospective” at Hillsdale College from October 2 – 5. I was present for excellent lectures by Craig Shirley and Peter Robinson. Shirley is the author of Reagan’s Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All and Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America, a book I reviewed on the PowerBlog. Robinson, a former speechwriter in the Reagan White House, authored the famous “Tear...

This past Sunday one of the songs in our worship service was the hymn, “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” Here’s the first stanza: All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful, The Lord God made them all. If the new translation of Abraham Kuyper, Wisdom & Wonder: Common Grace in Science & Art, were to have panion hymn, this might well be the perfect candidate. ...

My sister has a small pillow in her bedroom that’s embroidered with the words “She who dies with the most shoes wins.” I’m sure Lloyd Blankfein’s daughter has one just like it. And you’d think that the patchouli-scented Occupy Wall Street crowd might not like such a pillow, but you’d be wrong, as Ray Nothstine pointed out in this week’s Acton Commentary. The anger at Zuccotti Park isn’t sparked by greed on Wall Street, it’s sparked by greed in Zuccotti...

Acton has been heavily involved in developing a new initiative called PovertyCure, an international network that promotes entrepreneurial solutions to poverty rooted in the dignity of the human person. We are excited to announce the launch of PovertyCure this week. Acton has joined together with over 100 organizations to encourage people to rethink charity and development. In the last three years I’ve had the privilege of interviewing over a hundred people from all over the world—religious and political leaders, small...

“They were trying to blow me into heaven, but God wanted me on Earth.” – Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth’s courage, tenacity, and epic struggle for racial equality in the city of Birmingham, Alabama, is legendary. Birmingham, not so affectionately nicknamed “Bombingham” in the 1950s and 1960s for its propensity for racial acts of terror, named its airport after the famed American Civil Rights leader in 2008. This account, which speaks to the madness in Birmingham during his pastorate...

The presence of one group at the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests might be surprising: the Distributist Review has produced this flyer for distribution at the protests. They don’t seem to have asked themselves whether G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc would have gone down to protest with the unwashed masses (the answer, of course, is never in a million years)but contemporary “neodistributists” are a more inclusive set. Theygo far beyond the metaphysical and aesthetic principles of Chesterton and Belloc’s economics.Since...