Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Christian Social Thought

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s crass Marxist materialism

During a Martin Luther King Day discussion with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., made clear that she is not just a democratic socialist but a Marxian one. Evie Fordham of Fox Business has written a helpful summary of the remarks, including Ocasio-Cortez’s concise explanation of the Marxist theory of the exploitation of labor: “No one ever makes a billion dollars. Continue Reading...

Why Scruton matters

The late Sir Roger Scruton, the eminent philosopher of aesthetics, politics, liberty, and culture, returned home to his Creator last Sunday. Scruton was famous, among other things, for running an underground university for Czechoslovakian dissidents during their country’s communist regime while teaching them Western philosophy, history and literature. Continue Reading...

Richard Reinsch on Rubio’s ‘materialistic’ industrial policy

Last November, my colleague Dan Hugger critiqued comments by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) about his desire for “common good capitalism” informed by Roman Catholic social teaching. Generally speaking, this is an aspiration that many at the Acton Institute share, but the specifics of what that would look like are where the real differences lie. Continue Reading...

Turning points in Catholic social teaching

In a recent Acton Line podcast I began by asking Father Robert Sirico the very large question, what is Catholic social teaching and why is it important today? He answered that the Church has always had a social teaching but that when we usually discuss Catholic social teaching today we begin with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum. Continue Reading...