Dylan Pahman

Dylan Pahman, Ph.D., is a research fellow at the Acton Institute and founder and president of the St. Nicholas Cabasilas Institute. He is author of The Kingdom of God and the Common Good: Orthodox Social Thought (Ancient Faith, 2025) and Foundations of a Free Society & Virtuous Society (Acton, 2017). With John Pinheiro, he is also coeditor of The Christian Roots of American Liberty (Acton, forthcoming in 2026), a sourcebook charting the prehistory of American founding principles through the ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds.

Posts by Dylan Pahman

The Consolation of the Cross

Reflecting on the crucifixion of Christ, the liberal Social Gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch claimed, “It requires no legal fiction of imputation to explain that ‘he was wounded for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities.’ Continue Reading...

John Locke on the “Iron Laws of the World”

On January 5 in an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN, Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff to president Donald Trump, defended the administration’s alarming embrace of military intervention in Venezuela and imperialistic aspirations more broadly on the global stage: The United States of America is running Venezuela. Continue Reading...

Commemorating Christian Labor

The first Monday in September is Labor Day in the United States and Canada, commemorating the contributions of organized labor to improved working conditions. The common story of Labor Day is typically secular: To fight for higher wages, safer workplaces, and shorter workweeks, workers formed unions to bargain collectively or, if necessary, to strike. Continue Reading...

Bloody Sunday, Black Friday, and Christmas

In the opening track to their now-classic 1983 album, War, Irish rock band U2 sang about “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” I can’t believe the news today Oh, I can’t close my eyes and make it go away … Broken bottles under children’s feet Bodies strewn across the dead-end street But I won’t heed the battle call It puts my back up, puts my back up against the wall Bono was supposedly singing about the “Bloody Sunday” of January 20, 1972, in which 26 unarmed protesters were shot by British troops in Bogside in Derry, Northern Ireland. Continue Reading...

Friendship, Markets, and Reciprocal Gifts

In his 2009 encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI highlighted the inadequacy of a social imaginary that includes only the market and the state: The exclusively binary model of market-plus-State is corrosive of society, while economic forms based on solidarity, which find their natural home in civil society without being restricted to it, build up society. Continue Reading...

Santa Claus vs. Artemis: A Christmas Story

As we deck the halls with boughs of holly this year, read the story of Christ’s Nativity, sing hymns and carols, exchange gifts, and light our homes in increasingly irrational competition verging on mutually assured destruction with our neighbors, we must not lose sight of the real “reason for the season”: Santa’s victory over the pagan goddess Artemis. Continue Reading...