Acton Line

In the late 1960’s as the hippie movement was shredding norms of hygiene and cleanliness in order to live more ‘authentically’, diseases emerged not seen in so long they didn’t have a latin name. The hippies, and others, were relearning why we engaged in certain hygienic practices all over again.  In an essay titled “The Great Unlearning” from the January 2024 issue of National Review, senior writ...

On today’s episode, Acton director of marketing and communications Eric Kohn speaks with Mike Cosper, director of podcasting for Christianity Today, about his recent trip to Israel. How has the region changed since the October 7 terrorist attacks? What do Christians in the region think? What hopes do those caught in the middle of the conflict have? The stories Mike heard, the people he talked to,...

On today’s episode, Acton director of marketing and communications Eric Kohn speaks with Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), about his new book, The Canceling of the American Mind. Cancel culture appears to be pervasive, and this book is the first to examine the effect it has had—and is having—on the United States. How are both left and...

On today’s episode of Acton Line, we bring you a conversation about poverty recently held on our sister podcast, Acton Unwind. Acton’s Eric Kohn and Dan Hugger are joined by their colleague Michael Matheson Miller, who discusses his essay “The Poverty Pyramid Scheme,” and AIER’s Samuel Gregg on his book review “Mistaken About Poverty.” Both pieces appear in a special poverty-themed edition of RELI...

Your strengths, relationships, and self-awareness are all essential in determining how your business will operate—and whether it will succeed or fail. But how can you optimize each of these elements? How can you set realistic goals? How can your business overcome a plateau and continue to grow? SpringGR aims to answer these questions by connecting entrepreneurs with the intellectual, social, and f...

In 2007, Thales Academy was born with a simple vision: provide an excellent and affordable education through the use of Direct Instruction and a Classical Curriculum that embodies traditional American values. In The Thales Way, Robert L. Luddy, the founder of Thales Academy and several other schools, explains the rationale for the school's educational approach and elaborates on his mission to bett...

You’ve probably heard the phrase “America isn’t a democracy—it’s a republic.” This is typically trotted out to make a salient point about the type of government we have in fact, but is it a distinction the Founding Fathers would have recognized and made themselves? Yes and no, says Jay Cost, the Gerald R. Ford nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the new boo...

In this episode, we present the most recent installment of the Acton Lecture Series, with Dr. Mary L. Hirschfeld. Economists investigate the workings of markets and tend to set ethical questions aside. Theologians often dismiss economics, losing insights into the influence of market incentives on individual behavior. Dr. Hirschfeld bridges this gap by showing how a humane economy can lead to the g...

In this episode, Acton director of programs and education Dan Churchwell speaks with Leah Kral, an expert facilitator and author who helps nonprofits doing the hard work of building civil society to innovate and be more effective. Good intentions alone don’t translate to impact, so why are nonprofits like the Mayo Clinic so successful when others fail? How can innovation, creativity, originality,...

Learn more about Acton UniversityOn today’s episode, we present a discussion from Acton University 2023 between director of marketing and communications Eric Kohn and North Korean defector and human rights activist Yeonmi Park. At age 13, Park and her family made a daring escape from North Korea in search of a life free of tyranny. In her viral talks, viewed online nearly 250 million times, Park u...

In this episode, Acton’s director of marketing and communications, Eric Kohn, talks with Jonathan Greenberg, the Jack Miller Family Foundation’s director of freedom initiatives and the former Midwest director for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee about the long history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the significance of the October 7 massacre, especially what it will mean for Is...

In this episode, Acton director of marketing and communications Eric Kohn speaks with Bill Courtney about coaching football, running a successful lumber business, and walking the red carpet with George Clooney and P. Diddy. In 2003, Bill began coaching the Manassas Tigers, an inner-city Memphis high school football team that had never once won a playoff game. By 2008, Courtney had helped build an...

Dr. Angela Dills is a labor economist who teaches at Western Carolina University and whose work focuses on the economics of education, crime, and health. In this episode of Acton Line, Angela and Dan Hugger discuss her research into the gender wage gap. Do women really earn only $0.83 for every $1.00 a men earn? Do the data represent a true “apples to apples” comparison? How much of the gender wag...

In this episode, Dr. John Pinheiro speaks with Dr. Joseph Stuart about the complexity of the European Enlightenments: namely, the most common misconceptions and the mistake made by Christian and secular scholars alike who see in the Enlightenments only a simplistic conflict between faith and reason.   Professor Stuart argues that Christians interacted with the Enlightenments by using one of three...

Dr. Bradley J. Birzer, Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies and professor of history at Hillsdale College, discusses his new book, Mythic Realms: The Moral Imagination in Literature & Film with Dan Hugger. How does Mythic Realms extend the author’s prior work on Christian humanism? What is the role of the moral imagination in navigating popular culture? What do the pulps have to do with rom...

Joseph Lemoine, deputy director of the Freedom and Prosperity Center at the Atlantic Council, joins Stephen Barrows, Acton’s COO, to discuss the Atlantic Council’s recently released 2023 Freedom and Prosperity Indexes.  The Freedom and Prosperity Center created these indexes to provide a snapshot of the current distribution of freedom and prosperity around the world; gain a sense of the evolution...

Better WAY Detroit engages, pays, feeds, and counsels homeless persons, and connects them to services for housing, medical and mental health care, and stable employment opportunities. Through their efforts, participants inspire community spirit, pride of ownership, and confidence in the dignity of work. While serving as participants, we also mentor them so that they can best help them find permane...

Dr. Brandon Vaidyanathan, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at The Catholic University of America, shares his thoughts on “Organizational Culture” with Sarah Negri, Research Project Coordinator at the Acton Institute, at Acton University 2023. They discuss how culture affects us as humans without our being aware of it and how we in turn can affect culture through our fre...

In this episode, Dylan Pahman interviews Dr. Rachel Ferguson about her lecture at Acton University on the problem of political polarization. From social media to cable news to tribalism to racial injustice to transgender activism, Dr. Ferguson gets at the deeper roots of the problem and offers a path of hope grounded in her Christian faith and philosophical expertise. Subscribe to our podcasts  Bl...

The law of conservation of mass dates from Antoine Lavoisier's 1789 discovery that mass is neither created nor destroyed in chemical reactions. Evidence of the past three decades leads Marvin Olasky to suggest a parallel Law of Conservation of Welfare regarding political reactions. In 1995-1996 the first GOP-majority House of Representatives in four decades changed AFDC (Aid to Families with Depen...

In this episode of Acton Line, Dylan Pahman, executive editor of the Journal of Markets and Morality, and a research fellow here at Acton, interviews Dr. Anne Rathbone Bradley about her lecture at Acton University on “Corporate Welfare and Inequality.”  In this conversation, this discuss why  the prices of some goods, like education and healthcare, risen at astronomical rates while others, such as...

If you asked people to describe our current cast of politicians in America right now, they might say that some, if not most, are slyly taking advantage of the system. They are hoping no one is savvy enough to notice.  Matt Lewis, senior columnist at The Daily Beast, believes that today’s politicians are an unsavory lot—a hybrid of plutocrats and hypocrites. And it’s worse (and more laughable) than...

Kevin Vallier, political philosopher and associate professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University, joins Dan Hugger to discuss Catholic Integralism and his forthcoming book All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism, which publishes with Oxford University Press in September. What is Catholic Integralism and what is its relation to Catholic Social Teac...

In this episode, Father Roger J. Landry, a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, and Catholic Chaplain to Columbia University in New York City sits down with Sarah Negri, Research Project Coordinator at the Acton Institute, to discuss the social teaching of Pope John Paul II and especially his emphasis on the vocation of the Christian entrepreneur. Father Landry shares some history o...

This week, we’re bringing you one of the plenary lectures from this year’s Acton University, featuring Bishop Robert Barron speaking on “The Philosophical Roots of Wokeism.” "Wokeism” is arguably the most influential public philosophy in our country today. It has worked its way into the minds and hearts of our young people, into the world of entertainment, and into the boardrooms of powerful corpo...