Rev. Ben Johnson is Executive Editor of the Acton Institute's flagship journal Religion & Liberty and edits its transatlantic website.
Posts by Rev. Ben Johnson
November 30, 2020
To paraphrase an overrated writer, a spectre is haunting the United States – the spectre of religious repression in the name of stanching the coronavirus. The Supreme Court took a step toward exorcising that threat just before Thanksgiving.
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November 26, 2020
Thanksgiving in 2020 seems to be an oxymoron. What good can we celebrate in the year that witnessed an ongoing global health pandemic, an artificial economic crisis, and the largest federal budget deficit in U.S.
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November 26, 2020
This year, some families have little reason to give thanks, because political arguments have turned the holiday dinner table into a war zone. Friends, even relatives have cut ties with people who don’t share their political perspectives.
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November 25, 2020
As an estimated 50 million Americans plan to travel for Thanksgiving holiday celebrations, politicians across the U.S. and Europe have introduced legislation to increase the gasoline tax. Legislators should listen to an outspoken foe of those taxes: Sen.
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November 24, 2020
Economists and ethicists agree: A worker should be evaluated by the job he does, not his political views. But the more politicized life becomes, the greater the chance a competent employee will lose his or her job because of his private political views.
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November 20, 2020
Everyone in the global fight for liberty has some item that cultivated his intellectual palate. For Chinese dissident Jimmy Lai, it was a candy bar.
As an eight-year-old boy, he worked as a baggage carrier in a railway station in his native mainland China.
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November 19, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has further eroded America’s already flagging support for religious liberty, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito warned in a prophetic speech to the Federalist Society. Alito’s critics described his clarion call to respect our nation’s first freedom as “charged,” “unusually political,” and “unscrupulously biased, political, and even angry.”
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November 16, 2020
Such simple concepts of economics as scarcity, the importance of contract enforcement and private property rights, and the retreat of global poverty seem altogether foreign to many influential people — including many who make economic policy.
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November 13, 2020
As if 2020 could not get any worse, this week intellectuals unleashed another pandemic: a new proposed tax. Deutsche Bank suggested that the government lay a 5% “privilege” tax on employees who work from home, on the grounds that they “disconnect themselves from face-to-face society.”
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November 09, 2020
Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the UK and a member of the House of Lords, passed away early on the morning of Saturday, November 7, 2020, following his third bout with cancer.
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