Don’t miss out on your chance to apply for a scholarship for the spring 2013 semester!

If you or someone you know would like to be considered for a Calihan Academic Fellowship, the deadline to submit application materials is Monday, October 15. Eligible candidates include graduate students or seminarians pursuing fields such as theology, philosophy, economics, or related themes promoted by the Acton Institute. Visit the Calihan Academic Fellowship page on Acton’s website for more detailed information on eligibility and the application process. Contact Michelle at mhornak@acton.org with any scholarship-related questions.

Read more on Monday: Calihan Scholarship Deadline…

Acton Institute President and Co-Founder Rev. Robert A. Sirico was invited on America’s Morning News, a syndicated radio show, earlier this week to talk about tonight’s vice-presidential debate between Vice President Joe Biden and Rep. Paul Ryan. Rev. Sirico talks about how the candidates’ Catholic faith will play into the exchange. Click on the player below to listen in.

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Current lawsuits against the HHS contraceptive mandate may undermine religious liberty in the long run, says Vincent Phillip Munoz. Not all religious objectors to the mandate are likely to be exempted even if the lawsuits are successful, and judges violate the core meaning of religious liberty when they assess plaintiffs’ religious character:

Read more on The Religious Liberty Case Against Religious Liberty Litigation…

C.S. Lewis may not have written specifically about economics, but as Harold B. Jones Jr. explains, there’s reason to consider him a defender of the free market:

. . . C. S. Lewis had much in common with the great free-market thinkers of his time. He is discovered on careful examination to have been writing about many of the same issues as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek and on these issues to have been in perfect agreement with them. The dates are worth considering. Bureaucracy, one of Mises’s critiques of governmental economic intervention, came out in 1944. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom came out the same year. Lewis had released The Abolition of Man only a year before, and in the year that followed his That Hideous Strength made its debut. All these books were written to defend the idea of the individual human being as the locus of rational choice and moral responsibility. Mises and Hayek wrote as economists and Lewis as a lay theologian, but all three wrote to challenge the assault on human nature in the name of a false ideal.

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Today, October 11, has been declared the International Day of the Girl Child by the United Nations. According to the Day of the Girl Campaign located in Washington, DC, this day “serves to recognize girls as a population that faces difficult challenges, including gender violence, early marriage, child labor, and discrimination at work” for females under 18. Admirably, this day seeks to draw attention to global issues such as the high drop-out rate of girls from school, child marriage, and human trafficking.

Read more on International Day of the Girl, and a Lot of Them Are Missing…

The Economics of John Calvin
Timothy Terrell, Economics for Everybody

Ask someone what Calvinism has to do with economics, and you’ll probably get a blank stare.

European Parliament holds seminar on Discrimination of Christians in Europe
Russian Orthodox Church

Read more on PowerLinks – 10.11.12…

Historical church figures are being recruited for partisan political purposes, which means it must be election season. In this week’s commentary (published October 10), Acton Research Fellow Kevin E. Schmiesing looks at the case one HuffPo writer makes for St. Vincent de Paul as a supporter of President Barack Obama. But Schmiesing warns that “viewing Vincent’s work as little more than political activism not only distorts his biography; it reduces his extraordinary, grace-enabled sanctity to ordinary humanistic compassion.” The full text of his essay follows. Subscribe to the free, weekly Acton News & Commentary and other publications here.

Read more on Acton Commentary: Vincent de Paul, Welfare Statist?…

Angola inmates in the prison auto shop. (Photo by Erin Oswalt for Acton Institute)

In mid-September I ventured down to South Louisiana to visit and tour the Louisiana State Penitentiary, more commonly known as Angola Prison. My commentary this week “Angola Prison, Moral Rehabilitation, and the Things Ahead” is based on that visit. Burl Cain, Angola’s warden, will be featured in an upcoming issue of Religion & Liberty. I will be providing more information on Angola and my time down there, but think of this commentary as an introduction of sorts to what I witnessed.

Read more on Angola Prison and Chuck Colson’s Legacy…

In case you haven’t already heard the rumor, allow me to fill you in: AU Online has an awesome, newly revamped website and digital learning platform. AU Online is designed to make the resources and tools of a typical Acton conference available through a university-level, online environment. The AU Online team hopes the new features and functions will make this program your go-to destination for the integration of faithful intentions and sound economic reason.

Read more on The New and Improved AU Online…

“The world thinks of the state’s sovereignty in terms of power; Catholic social doctrine understands the state to be in service to all,” says Patrick Brennan, a professor of law at Villanova University. Brennan has a new paper, ‘Religious Freedom,’ the Individual Mandate, and Gifts: On Why the Church is Not a Bomb Shelter.’ From the abstract:

Read more on The Church is Not a Bomb Shelter…