is director of research at the Acton Institute. He has written and spoken extensively on questions of political economy, economic history, ethics in finance, and natural law theory. He has an MA in political philosophy from the University of Melbourne, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in moral philosophy and political economy from the University of Oxford.
Posts by Samuel Gregg
January 16, 2020
In 2019, the mighty German economy, the economic powerhouse of the European Union, grew a mere 0.6 percent. That’s right. It grew just over half a percent. In 2018, Germany grew 1.5 percent.
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January 09, 2020
There’s more depressing news from China. Its Religious Affairs Office has announced that, not only must all religious organizations get state approval for any activity they undertake, they are also expected to “spread the principles and policies of the Chinese Communist Party.”
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December 16, 2019
The inauguration of modern Catholic social teaching that occurred when Pope Leo XIII published the first modern social encyclical
Rerum Novarum in 1891 marked a new stage in the Catholic Church’s engagement with the modern world.
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December 09, 2019
The world of medieval history suffered a great loss on November 30 with the death of Professor Brian Tierney. Widely recognized as a leading scholar of medieval Western Christianity and how church law and institutions affected the broader culture of Europe, Tierney wrote widely but also deeply on topics ranging from the origins of papal infallibility to how religion shaped the development of constitutionalism.
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December 03, 2019
Britain’s 2019 General Election is unusual for many reasons. It’s not odd for British religious leaders to express their views about what they think their congregants should consider before they go to the polls.
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November 26, 2019
The days in which many Westerners celebrated what many thought was mainland China’s inevitable march towards freedom as a consequence of its limited opening to global trade are now well and truly over.
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November 13, 2019
There’s rarely a day when China isn’t featured prominently in the news. Once upon a time, most of that coverage was about China’s rise out of poverty. Now, however, greater attention is being given to some decidedly negative developments.
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November 08, 2019
It is no great secret that one of the few institutions that has stood firm against the socialist Maduro dictatorship in Venezuela is the Catholic Church. Most other institutions have dissolved, broken or thoroughly compromised.
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October 30, 2019
It’s been a good week for the left throughout Latin America. In Columbia, center-left and left-wing parties did well in regional election. Argentina also took a left-turn with a left-wing Peronist easily winning the presidency, and bringing the former president Cristina Kirchner back to office as Vice-President.
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October 23, 2019
As we’ve seen in countries like Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua, Latin American left-leaning populists are quite content to work in democratic systems—until, that is, those systems start delivering results which they don’t like.
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