Acton Institute Powerblog

Promoting free societies characterized by liberty & religious principles

Religion & Liberty: Governor Mark Sanford

The new issue of Religion & Liberty featuring an interview with South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is available online, now in its entirety. From the very beginning, Governor Sanford has been a vocal critic of all bailout and stimulus legislation pouring out of Washington, regardless of who is occupying the White House. Continue Reading...

Speech Codes Limit Campus Freedom

In this week’s Acton commentary, I researched and wrote about the danger of speech codes and the limiting of free expression on college campuses. Like many conservatives in an academic atmosphere, I have also lived through the deceit and intimidation of out-of-control ideologues on campus. Continue Reading...

Review: Upstream by Alfred Regnery

Shaped by the conservative movement since childhood, publisher Alfred S. Regnery offers an insider’s take on the influence of conservatives in Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism (2008). Regnery’s father Henry started the company in 1947 and published conservative classics such as God and Man at Yale by William F. Continue Reading...

Review: Righteous Warrior

Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism, a political biography published in February, crafts a narrative that largely reinforces popular public images of the late Jesse Helms as a demonizing figure. Continue Reading...

Poetic justice

On an episode of NPR’s Talk of the Nation last month, professor Jay Parini of Middlebury College discussed his role in the criminal justice sentences given to students who were involved in the vandalism of the former summer home of renowned poet Robert Frost. Continue Reading...

The New Martyrs

People light candles below a wooden cross at a site south of Moscow where at the height of Josef Stalin’s political purges 70 years ago firing squads executed thousands of people perceived as enemies of communism. Continue Reading...

‘I Am Not Afraid of Death’

Alexander Solzhenitsyn Der Spiegel has published a far ranging interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn in which the great writer “discusses Russia’s turbulent history, Putin’s version of democracy and his attitude to life and death.” Continue Reading...

Truth, Relativism, and the Free Society

Michael Miller at ALS “Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority of government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put on this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer.” Continue Reading...