Can Capitalism Save the Arts?

Capitalism is routinely castigated as an enemy of the arts, with much of the finger-pointing bent toward monsters of profit and efficiency. Other critiques take aim at more systemic features, fearing that the type of industrialization that markets sometimes tend toward will inevitably detach artists from healthy social contexts, sucking dry any potential for flourishing as a result. Continue Reading...

Nothing New ‘Underneath that Burning Sun’

Friedrich Hayek once called intellectuals “professional secondhand dealers in ideas.” And the Preacher proclaimed, “There is nothing new under the sun.” So perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising when ideas, memes, and other cultural phenomena pop up again and again. Continue Reading...

Acton On WOOD Radio With Mako Fujimura

Acton broadcast consultant, Paul Edwards, will guest host West Michigan Live on Tuesday, October 21 at 9:00 am EST on WOOD Radio in Grand Rapids. His guest at 9:30 a.m. is artist Makoto Fujimura, whose 2014 ArtPrize entry, Walking on Water, was exhibited at the Acton Building. Continue Reading...

Is G. K. Chesterton Still Relevant? Why, Yes

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) is considered by many to be one of the most brilliant thinkers of the 20th century. But you’d be hard-pressed to find him discussed in any public high school (or even most colleges or universities, for that matter.) Continue Reading...

Radio Free Acton: The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke

This week on Radio Free Acton, Michael Matheson Miller takes the interviewer’s chair for a conversation with David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English at Yale University, to discuss the thought of Edmund Burke in the wake of the release of Bromwich’s first volume of what will be a two-volume intellectual biography of Burke. Continue Reading...

Progressivism Gone Awry

Saul Bellow is a writer who has affected me profoundly before. I have recently found a pair of essays given by him as part of the Tanner Lectures under the title, “A Writer from Chicago.” Continue Reading...