Post Tagged 'lord acton'

January 29, 2014

Religious Liberty and the Loss of our Roots

If the American Founding got one thing right more than anything, it was its commitment to a broad and liberal religious liberty. In 1790, President George Washington told a Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, “The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy; a policy worthy of imitation.” Continue Reading...

November 14, 2013

Richard Weaver on Liberty and Christianity

Richard Weaver, one of the great intellectuals of the 20th Century, and author of Ideas Have Consequences, published an essay in the early 1960s on Lord Acton (pdf only). Much of Weaver’s essay is worth highlighting, but one excerpt in particular reminds us of the central significance of Christianity in the battle for freedom. Continue Reading...

October 31, 2013

Reformation and the Need for Truth

Martin Luther “did more than any single man to make modern history the development of revolution,” declared Lord Acton. (Lectures on Modern History) The Protestant Reformation profoundly changed the trajectory of Western Civilization. Continue Reading...

August 06, 2013

Lord Acton and America’s Moral Absolutes Concerning Liberty

Lord Acton once said of the American revolution: “No people was so free as the insurgents, no government less oppressive than the government which they overthrew.” It was America’s high view of liberty and its ideas that cultivated this unprecedented freedom ripe for flourishing. Continue Reading...

May 16, 2013

Senator Cornyn Quotes Lord Acton on Abuse of Power

Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) took to the Senate floor yesterday and quoted Lord Acton’s well known dictum, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” There’s a partisan bite to his words, but he mostly warns against the grave dangers and tyranny under concentrated and centralized power. Continue Reading...

May 03, 2013

Justice Scalia Echoes Lord Acton’s Warning on Corrupting Power

Reading through Scalia Dissents: Writings of the Supreme Court’s Wittiest, Most Outspoken Justice, I came across this gem: “No government official is ‘tempted’ to place restraints upon his own freedom of action, which is why Lord Acton did not say ‘Power tends to purify.'” Continue Reading...

September 14, 2012

Speed Cameras and Moral Culture

In an odd story from Maryland, Ari Ashe of WTOP reports, Many people find speed cameras frustrating, and some in the region are taking their rage out on the cameras themselves. Continue Reading...

September 11, 2012

Review: A Free People’s Suicide

Below is my review of A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future by Os Guinness. A final version of this book review will appear in the Fall 2012 Journal of Markets & Morality (15.2). Continue Reading...

July 17, 2012

Os Guinness on Solzhenitsyn and Truth

Os Guinness makes the concise yet brilliant defense of the centrality of truth in the introduction to One Word of Truth: A portrait of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn by David Aikman. This short introduction not only offers keen insight into Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but directly speaks to the ills of our society. Continue Reading...

July 01, 2011

Coolidge and ‘the best ideas of democracy’

If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. — Calvin Coolidge. The Wall Street Journal published today a timely, and much needed, reflection by Leon Kass on Calvin Coolidge’s address delivered at the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1926. Continue Reading...

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