Acton Line

The question of how to reconcile our faith and our work is a permanent challenge after the fall into sin.  In the Hebrew scriptures we read that God judges Adam: “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.” Recent years have seen a reinvigorated discussion, and even a broad movement, focused on the intersection of faith and work i...

Over the past several years, American institutions have faced challenges that have placed an enormous amount of stress and strain on them. Some of those challenges have been emergent phenomenon, while other challenges have been intentionally inflicted by political actors.  In addition to the institutions themselves faltering for their own internal reasons, and in some senses being fed by that falt...

In this episode, we’re bringing you another conversation from our recent Poverty Cure Summit. The Poverty Cure Summit provided an opportunity for participants to listen to scholars, human service providers, and practitioners address the most critical issues we face today which can either exacerbate or alleviate poverty. These speakers discussed the legal, economic, social, and technological issues...

Today’s episode is a rebroadcast that originally aired in March of 2019, but holds incredible relevance to conversations we’re still having today. This conversation with Tim Carney, editor at the Washington Examiner and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, explores the subject matter of his 2019 book, “Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse."  To the ext...

It’s been a challenging year. A global pandemic, violent unrest in the streets of major American cities, and a divisive presidential election have all challenged us in different ways, testing the strength of civil society and institutions at both the local and national level Throughout the year, Acton’s president and co-founder, Rev. Robert Sirico, has offered commentary on these events as they un...

Social capital – the capacity of people to cooperate towards common aims – is an indispensable element of a free and prosperous society yet many studies demonstrate that it has been steadily eroded in recent decades. Social pathologies such as the breakdown of the family, addiction, and deaths of despair are strongly correlated with weakening social ties and norms. The decline in social capital ha...

This week we’re bringing you another conversation from our recent Poverty Cure Summit. The Poverty Cure Summit provided an opportunity for participants to listen to scholars, human service providers, and practitioners address the most critical issues we face today which can either exacerbate or alleviate poverty. These speakers discussed the legal, economic, social, and technological issues pertai...

On December 2nd, 2020, the economist Walter E. Williams passed away at the age of 84. Williams worked his way out of grinding poverty in the Philadelphia housing projects to chair George Mason University’s economics department. Over his career he authored 10 books and more than 150 other publications, and become one of the most recognized commentators on our American public life of the last four d...

Common Grace is both a theological doctrine within the reformed tradition and the title of a truly monumental book discussing the doctrine by the theologian and statesmen Abraham Kuyper. It is grace from God that is common to all of mankind distinct from both the special grace by which God redeems, sanctifies, and glorifies his people as well as the gift of creation itself. Kuyper puts it this way...

For this week’s episode, we’re bringing you a conversation that was a part of Acton’s recent Poverty Cure Summit. The Poverty Cure Summit provided an opportunity for participants to listen to scholars, human service providers, and practitioners address the most critical issues we face today which can either exacerbate or alleviate poverty. These speakers discussed the legal, economic, social, and...

In 1958, in the wake of the Soviet Union launching Sputnik 1 – the world’s first artificial satellite – into space, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act into law. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, was born. And the space race was underway. In the following decades, the world would see the first man in space, the first spacewalk, and...

In the wake of George Floyd’s death in May of 2020, people took to social media to advocate for causes stemming from that horrible incident. Ranging from simply expressing “Black Lives Matter” to posting a black square on Instagram on a designated day and everything in between, an expectation that everyone must make a statement seemed to emerge. It was an expectation that was extended beyond indiv...

The United States is consumed with questions regarding race, the legacy of slavery, and the nature of social justice. Where are people of faith to turn? For most of the last two thousand years Christians have believed that God deals with nations as nations and enters into closer relations with societies that claim him as Lord. This belief in the national covenant, only recently out of fashion, is...

On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published an expose on former Vice President and current Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, headlined, “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad.” Shortly after the article’s publication, the ability to share the link to the story was limited and, in some cases, prohibited by Facebook an...

In his article in the June 2020 issue of the Journal of Institutional Economics, Dr. P.J. Hill, who served as the George F. Bennett Professor of Economics at Wheaton College until his retirement in 2011, begins by saying, “in any discussion of the beginning of modern economic growth, the concept of the rule of law plays a crucial role," and that, "the lack of such an order is the fundamental cause...

On October 3rd, 2020, Pope Francis released the third encyclical letter of his pontificate: Fratelli Tutti. Literally translated as “Brothers all,” Fratelli Tutti is a call from Pope Francis for more human fraternity and solidarity. In it, Francis addresses a number of topics, including racism, immigration, capital punishment, war, politics and economics. In addressing economic issues, Francis war...

In his article in the September 21st edition of National Review, “Toward a conservative environmentalism,” Nate Hochman says, “conservatism and conservation aren’t usually thought of as congruent; in fact, for the better part of a half century, many Americans have seen the two as antithetical.” Indeed, environmentalism generally, aspects of it like concern over global warming or climate change, an...

The untimely death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in February of 2016 amplified questions about the Supreme Court in the 2016 election to new highs. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s high wire act in denying a hearing and vote on President Barack Obama’s nominee to fill that seat, Judge Merrick Garland, ultimately paid off for him: President Donald Trump nominated Judge...

With fusionism – the strategic alliance of conservative foreign policy hawks, social conservatives and economic libertarians knitted together in the last half of the 20th century in opposition to international communism ­­– crumbling after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the modern conservative movement has been remaking itself in effort to address the problems of the current day. One of these seemi...

Charles Malik, the Lebanese diplomat and one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was intimately involved in the crises of his own day, from the challenge of international communism to the internal challenges and problems of the West itself. For Malik all of our challenges take the form of crises which, at their deepest levels, reflect Christ’s judgement. His profoundly th...

In his new book, The Socialist Temptation, author Iain Murray examines the resurgence of socialist ideology in America and across the world. Seemingly discredited just thirty years ago by the failures of the Soviet Union and Communist block Eastern Europe, socialism has seen a revival of support and popularity in the West. Murray sets out to explain why the socialist temptation endures even after...

On February 4th, 2004, a sophomore at Harvard University by the name of Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook. At the time, the social networking website was limited to only students at Harvard. And while other social networking platforms like MySpace and Friendster predated the launch of Facebook, it was that February day in Cambridge, Massachusetts that the age of social media was truly born. Tod...

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 has brought with it enormous costs. These include, first and foremost, an enormous cost in the terms of human life, with more than 178,000 deaths from the coronavirus in the United States alone, and at least 814,000 deaths worldwide, as of late August 2020. But also, with the pandemic have come significant economic costs, fiscal costs, and personal...

From accusations of embracing socialism leveled at the Obama administration by the Tea Party movement to the rise of self-proclaimed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders as the second highest vote-getter in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic Party primaries, socialism has been an emerging movement and topic of conversation in the American body politic. While polling data suggests that socialism is genera...

The conservative movement in America has always been evolving. From the old right of the progressive era to the conservative intellectual movement identified with William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review to the Reagan revolution to today, the political right in America has changed with the challenges it has faced and with the context of the times in which it has existed. The current iteration of...