Schall on wealth and poverty

The Jesuit journal In All Things devoted its Winter 2005-06 issue to the question of poverty in the United States. The issue brings together a number of perspectives from Jesuits, both liberal and conservative. Continue Reading...

Good intentions and unsound economics

This Sunday I went to Mass at a parish I’d never attended before. I was quite pleasantly surprised—the music wasn’t bad, the rubrics were followed, the homily focused on the gospel, they chanted the Agnus Dei, and prayed the prayer to St. Continue Reading...

Blogroll roundup

A few items of interest from friends on our blogroll: The Evangelical Ecologist and Dignan’s 75 Year Plan react to news about Michael Crichton’s visit with President Bush. GetReligion writes on the government closing of a newspaper in Russia. Continue Reading...

Fumbling with fundamentalism

One of the religion beat’s favorite canards is to implicitly equate what it calls American Christian “fundamentalism” with what it calls Muslim or Islamic “fundamentalism.” After all, both are simply species of the genus. Continue Reading...

Remembering Ed Opitz

The Rev. Edmund Opitz, a longtime champion of liberty, passed away on Feb. 11. Rev. Robert A. Sirico, president of the Acton Institute, looks back on Ed’s remarkable life in an article today on National Review Online (also available on the Acton site as a PDF). Continue Reading...

2006 Novak Award goes to leading Polish scholar

Dr. Jan Kłos of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin in Poland is the winner of the 2006 Novak Award and its associated $10,000 prize. An assistant professor with the department of Philosophy’s Chair of Social and Political Ethics, Dr. Continue Reading...

Stewardship and economics: two sides of the same coin

In yesterday’s Acton Commentary, I argued that the biblical foundation for the concepts of stewardship and economics should lead us to see them as united. In this sense I wrote, “Economics can be understood as the theoretical side of stewardship, and stewardship can be understood as the practical side of economics.” Continue Reading...

The dignity of every human being

The February 11 issue of WORLD Magazine includes a culture feature, “Giving their names back.” Profiled in the article is Citizens for Community Values (CCV), a nonprofit in Memphis that does a victim assistance program called “A Way Out.” Continue Reading...

Western Europe’s political homogeneity

Western Europeans often talk about the homogeneity of American politics and how the parties hardly differ from one another. One reason why Europeans believe this is because they often pay attention to US politics only during a presidential campaign, so they do have some justification. Continue Reading...