Dan Hugger is Librarian and Research Associate at the Acton Institute.
Posts by Dan Hugger
May 22, 2019
Today
The Atlantic has published a response essay from Fr. Robert Sirico to James Carroll’s call for the abolition of the priesthood, the magazine’s cover story this month:
James Carroll, the author of this month’s Atlantic’s cover story, “Abolish the Priesthood,” is famous in certain Catholic circles for his bitter denunciations of the Church.
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May 20, 2019
Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook and co-chairman of the Economic Security Project, has recently written an impassioned plea in the New York Times calling for the government to break up Facebook.
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May 15, 2019
Democratic presidential primary contender Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have unveiled a plan to cap credit-card interest rates at 15%:
Under the “Loan Shark Prevention Act,” the annual percentage rate applicable to any extension of credit would not be allowed surpass 15% on “unpaid balances, inclusive of all finance charges” or “the maximum rate permitted by the laws of the State in which the consumer resides.”
Consumer debt, and credit card debt in particular, is something many Americans struggle with and both the amount of total debt as well as the interest rates have escalated in recent years:
The median credit-card interest rate was 21.36% as of last week, compared with 12.62% a decade ago, according to Creditcards.com.
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May 09, 2019
As Acton’s librarian I can’t help but be immersed in the history of the Institute. I regularly stumble upon thought-provoking material from well before I began my work here in the late 2000’s which is itself a continuing education.
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May 02, 2019
Korey D. Maas, associate professor of history at Hillsdale College, has written a timely warning to American Catholics at Public Discourse titled, ‘The Coming Anti-Catholicism.’
Maas begins his essay with a recounting of the early history of American anti-Catholicism, its mitigation in the 1960s, and its troubling resurgence in recent years:
The combined effects of Camelot and the Council were to make political anti-Catholicism gauche almost overnight.
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April 22, 2019
The Malaysian High Court has upheld the previous Malaysian government’s ban on three books including Mustafa Akyol’s ‘Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty’. Akyol is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, where he focuses on public policy, Islam, and modernity.
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April 17, 2019
Earlier this month Fr. Robert Sirico delivered an address to the Liberty Forum of Silicon Valley titled, ‘Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy’.
The talk begins with an account of a formative childhood experience which first kindled in him a passion for justice.
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April 16, 2019
Rod Dreher is once again exasperated. He is frustrated by a rumor that George Weigel hasn’t bought the tireless promotion of his ‘Benedict Option’:
A few months ago, Weigel appeared at an event in Providence, RI, to discuss the Benedict Option.
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April 09, 2019
Fr. Robert Sirico was recently interviewed by Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J., on
The Catholic Current. Their topic: ‘Socialism & Venezuela: What Can Catholics Learn?’
The conversation was wide ranging. It begins with a consideration of the disastrous socialist commitment to central planning and its present fruit of shortages, starvation, and totalitarianism in Venezuela.
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April 02, 2019
When discussing the role of economics in our life and world I am always careful to make a distinction: life is economic but economics is not all of life. I’ve suggested this broader understanding of personal and social interests has been common among major free-market theorists since Adam Smith.
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