Michael Matheson Miller is a Senior Research Fellow at the Acton Institute
Posts by Michael Matheson Miller
September 30, 2019
The Gospel reading on Sunday was the story of Lazarus and the rich man. I often refer to this parable in discussions about poverty, because Augustine points out that it was not wealth that sent the rich man to hell, but his indifference.
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September 30, 2019
Secular materialists and atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris like to mock religious people for being superstitious and illogical: resorting to fanciful explanations of events by invoking the work of God or miracles.
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September 24, 2019
What is friendship? What does it mean to be or to have a friend? And why does Aristotle consider friendship a virtue and an important for political life?
Wilfred McClay has a nice essay on friendship at the Hedgehog Review, where he reflects on the title of the song “My New, Old Friend.”
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August 31, 2019
It is a common theme in fairy tales and other stories that the loser of the struggle will tell the victor that their victory will come with a cost. We see a similar theme in the Bible with the prophets–perhaps most famously when Israel finally gets the king they wanted so they could be like the other nations.
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August 31, 2019
The other evening I was at a pool with my family. It was beautiful and warm, and we decided to order some pizza and have dinner at one of the tables overlooking the pool.
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August 29, 2019
One of the constant refrains in economic development—and now environment issues—is the topic of population control. Evidence notwithstanding, the claim that population causes poverty and that the planet is facing a population explosion is taught as settled science—even in the face of serious population decline in some countries.
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August 28, 2019
I have been thinking a lot about all of the invisible things around us, important foundational things that we take for granted. Because they don’t immediately manifest themselves to our attention we can forget about them if we are not careful.
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July 31, 2019
One of my favorite contemporary writers is Theodore Dalrymple, whose essays I first discovered in The New Criterion about 20 years ago. He wrote that one of
his favorite writers, who also had a pen name, was the essayist and critic Simon Leys who died in 2014.
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July 31, 2019
Reuters reported today that a large portion of US farm aid went to the wealthiest farmers and advocacy group.
More than half of the Trump administration’s $8.4 billion in trade aid payments to U.S.
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July 30, 2019
Aristotle asked what made the good life? Was it pleasure, material wealth, honor, or virtue?
He argued that while pleasure, wealth, and honor were a part of a good life and human happiness, they could not constitute it.
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