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Public Life, Private Vice in American Life

In his latest book, Moral Vision: Leadership from George Washington to Joe Biden, Marvin Olasky, author of the highly influential Tragedy of American Compassion (and Acton affiliate scholar), examines American history in light of a Turkish saying, “the fish stinks first at the head,” meaning that moral decay at the highest echelons of society inevitably affects the whole. Continue Reading...

The Michaela Way and Living in Community

Educators love innovation. Education reform is a perennial theme in political campaigns, and almost every government has new rhetoric about how to reverse plummeting test scores, declining student achievement, and increased school violence and truancy. Continue Reading...

Friendship, Markets, and Reciprocal Gifts

In his 2009 encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI highlighted the inadequacy of a social imaginary that includes only the market and the state: The exclusively binary model of market-plus-State is corrosive of society, while economic forms based on solidarity, which find their natural home in civil society without being restricted to it, build up society. Continue Reading...

Genesis 1 vs. the Populist Threat

Political polarization is the watchword in this cultural moment. Family members and friends are estranged over everything from Trump to transgenderism. We seem strangely obsessed with the news and even rally our children as public mascots for our various causes. Continue Reading...

Can This Man—and the Black Church—Save America?

America is facing the political rerun from hell: a seemingly inevitable rematch between two of the most divisive presidential candidates in recent memory. We’re once again headed for the partisan trenches in this most beloved of quadrennial fiascos: the battle to see which very senior citizen will have access to nuclear codes (and the presidential X account) for the next four years. Continue Reading...

Mary’s Son, the Genius

It’s wrong to reduce Jesus to a moral teacher or mere philosopher. Jesus was not a wordsmith selling word salads, nor a crank peddling new ideas, nor a sophist showing off his rhetorical verve, nor an intellectual establishing his own academy à la Plato. Continue Reading...

The Abolition of America

Christopher Rufo is the American right’s man on fire. Perhaps no person has done more than Rufo to expose the true aim of identity politics and its enforcement arm, the diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) project: the abolition of American life. Continue Reading...

Threats to Religious Liberty in the U.K.

There is a real possibility that the next general election in the United Kingdom will take place within a few weeks of the presidential election in the United States. It is fair to say that no one knows what will happen on either side of the Atlantic. Continue Reading...