Rev. Robert A. Sirico, President of the Acton Institute, was in Overland Park, Kansas on April 27th to address an audience of local Acton friends and supporters. His topic was “The Moral Adventure of the Free Society.”

Read more on Audio: Sirico Speaks in Kansas…

For Christians giving is not about equations and intensives, says Peter Heslam, it’s about a spontaneous response to the grace of a lavishly generous God:
Read more on Loving God Should Liberate Generosity…

Each year tens of thousands of mostly underdressed people spend weeks hanging out in the Nevada desert in an “annual experiment in temporary community dedicated to radical self-expression and radical self-reliance.” If you’re like me, the first thing that comes to mind when you hear about the Burning Man festival is . . . hippies. Lots and lots of hippies.

But Burning Man isn’t a hippie festival. (Really, it’s not.) In fact, underneath it all, says the festival’s co-founder, Larry Harvey, is a very anti-hippie concept: “old-fashioned capitalism.”
Read more on The Free Enterprise Values of Burning Man…

Albert Hahn: Dr. Kuyper’s care for the little people (1905)

In yesterday’s post I highlighted a pair of articles that cover the transition over the last 120 years or so in the Netherlands from an emphasis on private charitable giving to reliance upon the welfare state. In some ways this story mirrors a similar transformation in American society as described by Marvin Olasky in his landmark book, The Tragedy of American Compassion.

Olasky’s work does double-duty, however, not only chronicling this transition but cogently arguing the superiority of voluntary aid and charity, which can effectively address both spiritual as well as material aspects of poverty.

In the special issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality on “Modern Christian Social Thought,” we also find a wonderful resource on this topic in the form of Abraham Kuyper’s reflection from 1895 on the relationship of Christ and the gospel to material concerns, “Christ and the Needy.”
Read more on The Tragedy of Dutch Compassion…

Current debates surrounding the U.S. federal budget have turned the spotlight on subsidiarity, solidarity and the common good, all aspects of Catholic social teaching. In an article by the Catholic News Service’s Dennis Sadowski, Acton research fellow and director of media Michael Matheson Miller said, “The principles are there. They are to guide us and we are to pay attention to them. You have to affirm those principles. Where Catholics are going to disagree is in the prudential implementation of them.”

Read more on U.S. Federal Budget Debate Highlights Catholic Social Teaching…

Why do democracies struggle with debt? One reason, as John Coleman notes, is that one of the problems is that debt is essentially an intergenerational wealth transfer:
Read more on Our National Debt is a Loan from Future Generations…

“Can one have an off day in giving the Jefferson Lecture (an off week or month in writing it)?” asks Matthew J. Franck in reference to the recent NEH honor afforded to agrarian Wendell Berry. “I’d like to think so. For judging by the text of the lecture Berry gave in Washington at the beginning of this week, his thinking can be fairly repellent.”

Read more on The Inhumane Wendell Berry…

Below is an excerpt from an early speech given by Calvin Coolidge to the Algonquin Club in Boston, Mass. in 1915. These remarks are included in a series of speeches Coolidge published in the book, Have Faith in Massachusetts. The speeches primarily deal with his philosophy of government, which because of his emphasis on foundational beliefs, remained consistent.

Read more on Coolidge and His Foundational Views on Government…

May 1st was the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker on the Catholic calendar, and in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI offered a short reflection on human labor when speaking to construction workers (via Whispers in the Loggia):

Read more on The Nobility and Greatness of Work…

“Walter Hooper once said of C.S. Lewis that he was the most truly converted person he had ever met,” says Baptist theologian Timothy George. “The same thing can be justly said of Charles W. Colson, who came to faith in Christ through reading Lewis’ Mere Christianity.”

In an article for the National Catholic Register, George examines the legacy of his friend, a man who helped forge Evangelicals and Catholics Together and the ‘Manhattan Declaration.’:

Read more on Charles Colson’s ‘Ecumenism of the Trenches’…