Acton Commentary

“As thousands of African migrants land on the golden beaches of Spain, old Europe shows the signs of fatigue,” says Mihail Neamtu in this week’s Acton Commentary. “In August, most of its politicians are on holiday. Continue Reading...

“The wider culture needs virtue education, because a free society relies on certain bedrock moral principles being inculcated and incarnated,” says Josh Herring in this week’s Acton Commentary. We need business men, doctors, lawyers, plumbers, electricians, and grocers who act with the honesty which allows the free market to thrive. Continue Reading...

“Christian leaders are often guilty of ‘souping up, the common good,” says Noah Gould in this week’s Acton Commentary. “Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, is no exception. In his latest book, Reimagining Britain: Foundations for Hope, Welby sets out to create a new social and political vision for the United Kingdom based on the common good.” The most precise definition Welby offers is that the common good “looks not to averages but to the totality of flourishing in a group.” He uses the story in Jeremiah 29 of how, when the Israelites were taken into captivity by the Babylonians, the prophet Jeremiah urged them to “seek the welfare of the city.” Based on this idea, he outlines a list of policy and cultural changes, including greater income redistribution, decreasing Britain’s reliance on the banking industry, and broadening the definition of family to include cohabitation. Continue Reading...

Roman Catholics and Protestants alike have forgotten that Protestants had a natural law theory, says E. J. Hutchinson in this week’s Acton Commentary. To be sure, the work is of historical interest, as a testimony to Melanchthonian and, more broadly, Protestant thinking on natural law in the 16th and 17th centuries. Continue Reading...

“The U.S. Supreme Court took a significant step toward restoring individual liberty in the government-sector labor market with its recent Janus decision,” says Charles W. Baird in this week’s Acton Commentary. Continue Reading...

“While classical education has exploded in recent decades, this movement of diverse schools lacks a philosophical figure who centers the goals of classical education,” says Josh Herring in this week’s Acton Commentary. Continue Reading...

A recent study concluded that members of the Eastern Orthodox Church, the second-largest church in Christendom, are likely to support left-wing economic policies. But that does not mean, says Krassen Stanchev in this week’s Acton Commentary, that Orthodox Christians are naturally statists: It is probably true that historically Orthodox countries (the study lumps in believers and non-believers alike) would fall into the group of those supporting greater government intervention in the economy. Continue Reading...

Culture wars are incredibly complex with overlapping conflicts that are often confused and conflated, says John D. Wilsey in this week’s Acton Commentary. For the past five decades, Americans have waged what has been commonly referred to as a “culture war.” A number of authors have examined the culture wars from philosophical, historical, and sociological standpoints, especially since the early 1990s—Charles Murray, Robert Putnam, James Davison Hunter, Philip Gorski, and Andrew Hartman to name a few. Continue Reading...