Rev. Ben Johnson is Managing Editor of the Acton Institute's flagship journal Religion & Liberty and edits its transatlantic website.
Posts by Rev. Ben Johnson
January 13, 2020
Sir Roger Scruton, whom Acton Institute co-founder Rev. Robert Sirico once described as “perhaps the world’s leading conservative philosopher,” passed away from cancer Sunday at the age of 75. His profound intelligence probed every subject from aesthetics and sexuality to religion and the minutiae of governing.
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January 13, 2020
“Real grief,” wrote Sir Roger Scruton in
Culture Counts, “focuses on the object, the person lost and mourned for, while sentimental grief focuses on the subject, the person who grieves.”
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January 10, 2020
In 1949, half-a-dozen ex-Communists wrote a book about their former faith, dubbing socialism
The God that Failed. As the UK’s revered National Health Service enters its worst spiral on record, it seems to have earned that title.
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January 08, 2020
China’s social credit system seeks to tie each individual’s credit rating and privileges to his support for the Communist regime. Venezuela’s socialist dictator, Nicolás Maduro, has moved to import “perhaps the creepiest tool of repression” to his own country, writes Doug Bandow in this week’s Acton Commentary.
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January 07, 2020
The former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson once said that “the NHS is the closest thing the English people have to a religion” – but as a new story shows, it is a religion that forces people to break the Ten Commandments.
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January 06, 2020
This morning, as Americans go to work for the first Monday of the New Year, a growing number will see their wages rise to $15 an hour or more – thanks, not to higher minimum wage laws, but to the bustling free market.
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January 03, 2020
As a new decade begins, it bears pausing to celebrate the strides the human race has made toward eradicating poverty at home and around the world. This is doubly important, as the television retrospectives not only omit our growing prosperity, but so many people believe things are actually getting worse.
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January 03, 2020
Although it was intended to be an Easter composition, the “Hallelujah” Chorus from Handel’s
Messiah has become the musical diadem of the Christmas season. It has already in early January vanished from the radio, because the modern West pre-celebrates all its holidays.
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January 02, 2020
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio began 2020, the year he intended to become president, by asserting that Domino’s Pizza “exploited” New Year’s Eve revelers in Times Square by selling pizzas for $30 apiece.
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December 31, 2019
Did liberty increase or decrease in each nation, and globally, in 2019? How has the last decade impacted freedom around the world?
The Cato Institute measures the freedom of each nation in the world and publishes the results.
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