Dan Hugger is Librarian and Research Associate at the Acton Institute.
Posts by Dan Hugger
November 13, 2019
In this week’s Acton Commentary I explore Presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris’s proposal to federalize day care to align school and work schedules as, “an economic growth and child development strategy”:
Economists, politicians, and even everyday people often talk of “the economy” as if it were a separate and distinct thing from the values, choices, and actions of everyday people.
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November 08, 2019
I’m just about halfway through my third reading of Umberto Eco’s marvelous first novel
The Name of the Rose. Every time I return to it I find something new. It is a murder mystery set in a medieval monastery but it is also so much more.
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November 01, 2019
Early last month there was a great debate over the question “What is Liberalism?” on the Free Thoughts Podcast. The debate was between Helena Rosenblatt, professor of history at City University of New York and Daniel Klein, professor of economics at George Mason University.
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October 25, 2019
Last night I gave an address at The Grand Castle in Grandville, Michigan on the occasioning of its library opening. I spoke on the importance of books and libraries. As the Librarian and a Research Associate at the Acton Institute it is a topic of professional interest but is also an abiding private passion.
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October 15, 2019
In last week’s Acton Commentary I expressed my hope that LeBron James wouldn’t just shut up and dribble in the wake of NBA appeasement and a coordinated sports media blackout regarding the protest movement in Hong Kong.
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October 14, 2019
Kai Weiss, Research Fellow at the Austrian Economics Center, has a new essay on
Law and Liberty exploring Lord Acton’s thoughts on nationalism:
A little-known 1862 work called
Nationality by Lord Acton can perhaps shed new light, too, on the topic.
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October 09, 2019
In this week’s Acton Commentary I discuss the raging controversy between the National Basketball Association, Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey, and China. Morey’s since deleted tweet expressing solidarity for the protest movement in Hong Kong led to criticism from the the Chinese regime, Chinese firms which sponsor the NBA, and NBA team owners.
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September 17, 2019
I am in the curious position of being a blogger who distrusts opinions. The late yoga master B.K.S. Iyengar put it best when he wrote, “An opinion is yesterday’s right or wrong knowledge warmed up and re-served for today’s situation.” Too often opinion is divorced from both personal experience and rigorous thought.
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September 11, 2019
Thirty five years ago the American novelist Thomas Pynchon asked the question, “Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?” The occasion was the then 25th anniversary of C.P. Snow’s Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures of the Scientific Revolution,” which argued, way back in 1959, that our culture was increasingly polarized into “literary” and “scientific” factions unable to understand each other.
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August 28, 2019
Jordan Ballor recently brought to my attention this remarkable passage from Michael Novak’s
The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, “Our moral and cultural traditions have not kept pace with our economic possibilities.
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