2023-05-04 12:33
For those of us who’ve devoted out lives to the liberal arts, it’s all too common to encounter doubters. As a high school English teacher, I encounter this all too frequently. Co… Read More
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The PowerBlog is managed by the Acton Institute, a non-profit think tank dedicated to promoting a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles.
2023-05-04 11:35
TikTok and its overseers within the Chinese Communist Party have suspended the Acton Institute’s TikTok account for continuing to tell the story of the Chinese crackdown on civil right… Read More
2023-05-03 12:46
Dreams can often turn into nightmares. And dreams in Hollywood are a special kind, as are the nightmares that can follow. One day you’re getting ready to audition for a role in a movie… Read More
2023-05-02 12:21
Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory presents a positive vision of gender as part of God’s good creation. She describes and responds to contemporary gender… Read More
2023-04-28 12:44
On this particular day … we had just said to one another that if our nature was so unhappy as to possess only a pseudo-intelligence capable of everything but the truth, if, sitting in… Read More
2023-04-27 19:19
As 75-year-old Jimmy Lai languishes in prison, the Hong Kong government, pressured by the Chinese Community Party (CCP), is dedicated to ensuring that the country’s most famous freedom… Read More
2023-04-27 12:03
It is never out of season to recall James Wilson’s line that the purpose of the Constitution was not to invent new rights “by a human establishment,” but to secure and enla… Read More
2023-04-26 11:44
Harrison Ford has suddenly returned to acting at the age of 80, after a decade of mostly forgettable cameos. He’s now making movies and even TV series that are bound to get quite a bit… Read More
2023-04-25 12:16
When the Berlin Wall fell, it was a commonplace observation that there were more Marxists in New York City than in the USSR. If the new Oxford University Press book Theater & Human Flour… Read More
2023-04-20 12:19
The Last of Us is the latest prestige drama from HBO and has gained near universal critical acclaim, garnering the second-largest audience for the network since 2010, trailing only the Game… Read More
2023-04-19 12:29
Depending on one’s perspective, religious freedom was either born or died with the founding of the United States of America. The colonial powers of Europe of the late 18th century had… Read More
2023-04-18 12:18
My initial impression of the film Jesus Revolution was a simple one, albeit a bit self-centered from a Gen-Z movie reviewer:
This isn’t a Gen-Z movie.
Rife with bell-bottom jeans, hipp… Read More
2023-04-14 11:48
George Whitefield’s first sermon after his ordination, in June 1736, prompted a complaint to the bishop! He later printed the sermon with the title On the Nature and Necessity of Our R… Read More
2023-04-13 19:14
Jimmy Lai is one of the Chinese Communist Party’s most prominent targets, and for good reason. The 75-year-old Hong Kong entrepreneur now sits shackled in solitary confinement for the… Read More
2023-04-13 11:46
Welcome to our company—we are a family and we’re glad you’re part of it!
You are not just a student here, you’re a member of the family.
We’re not just a busine… Read More
2023-04-12 12:25
’Tis a sigh that is wafted across the troubled wave,
’Tis a wail that is heard upon the shore
’Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave
Oh! Hard times come again… Read More
2023-04-11 12:06
Spencer Klavan’s How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises identifies five crises he believes are plaguing the West and slowly undermining America: Reality, the Body, Me… Read More
2023-04-07 12:29
If you enter a Catholic church this Good Friday, you will notice the atmosphere of silence and emptiness that hangs over the sanctuary. The tabernacle doors are open, revealing the vacancy w… Read More
2023-04-06 12:17
The most popular entertainment for boys not yet overtaken by the miserable ideology of our times is the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons, a source of friendship and adventure. It became… Read More
2023-04-05 11:05
Jason Blakely is professor of political science at Pepperdine University and has written a book, We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power, that is likely… Read More
2023-04-03 10:44
Today, April 3, 2023, is the 50th anniversary of the commercial introduction of cellphones. On this day in 1973, Martin Cooper of Motorola used a cellphone to place a call from Manhattan to… Read More
2023-03-30 10:31
Guillermo del Toro’s career is evidence that the Oscars still favor the romance of the left. He has just won the Best Animated Feature award for his Pinocchio, which he set in Fascist… Read More
2023-03-29 10:56
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping secured a third term last October. He continues to transform what once was loose authoritarian rule into a near-totalitarian system… Read More
2023-03-28 11:44
When Judge Antonin Scalia was confirmed to a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States on September 16, 1986, no senator voted in opposition. He was confirmed by a vote of 98-to-0, a ma… Read More
2023-03-24 11:30
Our journey through the 18th-century evangelical revival continues in the company of John Wesley (1703–1791). Wesley was an extraordinary individual. First, he was a systematic or… Read More
2023-03-23 11:34
Despite its popularity, or perhaps because of it, Stoicism is a difficult thing to define. Is it a philosophy, a nuanced outlook, a mindset, a healthy lifestyle, or a conservative fad? Conti… Read More
2023-03-22 22:03
75-year-old Jimmy Lai is a firsthand witness to the Chinese Communist Party’s dedication to punishing its political enemies. Trapped in solitary confinement, the freedom fighter and fo… Read More
2023-03-22 10:51
Hollywood has largely run out of artists and doesn’t seem able or perhaps even interested in producing movies that can hold a candle to the great achievements of its 100-year history… Read More
2023-03-21 11:44
It is safe to say C.S. Lewis is not known first of all for his treatment of totalitarianism. We are familiar with Lewis the Christian apologist, Lewis the writer of children’s stories… Read More
2023-03-16 11:43
The notion of rising income inequality has permeated modern American discourse and is assumed as inherent to our economic system such that any claim to the contrary is easily dismissed as ig… Read More
2023-03-15 10:51
Part 3 of my series on poverty and the welfare state ended with a brief look at two community associations in South Dallas. As the Washington welfare-reform impasse in 1995 and 1996 dragged… Read More
2023-03-14 12:19
Some years ago, only tangentially related to the reading we were doing in our seminar class, the students and I got into a conversation about jobs we found especially unappealing. I began wi… Read More
2023-03-10 12:30
I recently read the monumental essay “The Power of the Powerless” (1978) by Soviet dissident Václav Havel and immediately began to draw parallels between how he describes… Read More
2023-03-09 12:46
As Creating Christ will have it, Christianity as we know it was more or less invented, or at least redirected, by two members of the Flavian dynasty, Emperor Vespasian and his son (and event… Read More
2023-03-08 11:41
There are two reasons to read Glory M. Liu’s new comprehensive book, Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism. The first is tha… Read More
2023-03-07 12:45
With perhaps the exception of the recent Asbury revival, it’s rare to see Christianity referenced in popular culture in a positive way. Be it debates over Christian nationalism or the… Read More
2023-03-03 12:30
Sometimes God works and speaks to people in mysterious ways. At other times, He is as blunt and obvious as a slap in the face. The recent Asbury revival in Wilmore, Kentucky, qualifies as an… Read More
2023-03-02 12:58
The question of justice is fundamental to human nature and all human cultures. Little children have an immediate sense of fair and unfair, just and unjust. The theme of justice permeates myt… Read More
2023-03-01 11:53
One of this year’s Oscar darlings, Tár, also turns out to be the only major movie since #metoo to mount an attack on cancel culture. This is paradoxical, of course, as we see fr… Read More
2023-02-28 12:50
When the Gestapo was uncovering a left-wing conspiracy to overthrow Hitler, they called it “the Red Orchestra.” But they began to realize that there was another resistance moveme… Read More
2023-02-24 12:30
When I was four years old—and for many years later—my favorite pastime was frog hunting. There was no swamp pond or quagmire I was unwilling to traverse in the name of a robust… Read More
2023-02-23 12:30
Early in January, the U.S. Department of Defense began a massive undertaking to change the names of nine military bases, two ships, and over 1,000 other items, including signs and roads, all… Read More
2023-02-22 12:30
Of all the writers in the limited universe of Reagan biographers (myself included), William Inboden is one I have never met. His Amazon page shows only one previous book. I was surprised by… Read More
2023-02-21 18:14
Sitting in a prison cell, stripped of both legal counsel and liberty, 75-year-old entrepreneur and publisher Jimmy Lai has likely been tempted to give up the fight against the Beijing and it… Read More
2023-02-21 12:30
When Americans think of religious persecution, they typically think of communist and Islamist regimes—China and Saudi Arabia, for instance. However, one of the most intolerant societie… Read More
2023-02-16 12:55
At the beginning of the final episode of Derry Girls, the British Channel 4 TV series that ran for three seasons and that was also carried by Netflix in the U.S., Continue Reading Read More
2023-02-15 11:58
While Washingtonians in 1995 fought welfare battles on Capitol Hill, a struggle initially below press radar began in San Antonio. The July 5 afternoon temperature was 90 degrees as James Heu… Read More
2023-02-14 12:11
The film Women Talking opens with what amounts to a warning: “This is an act of female imagination.” That’s because it’s not actually a telling of the events on which… Read More
2023-02-10 12:42
In the middle decades of the 18th century, a powerful spiritual movement swept through much of North America and Great Britain, as well as some parts of northern Europe. This evangelical rev… Read More
2023-02-09 12:50
Earlier this week, Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist Linda Greenhouse came out of retirement on the opinion page of her former paper to warn Americans that their nation… Read More
2023-02-08 12:45
In 2021, for the first time in two decades of Gallup polling, America’s social ideology shifted. For the first time in two decades of Gallup polling, social liberals outnumbered their… Read More
2023-02-07 20:20
Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai has lost a great deal. From his news outlet, Next Digital, to his rights as a citizen of Hong Kong, 75-year-old Lai now sits in a prison cell for his pro-demo… Read More
2023-02-07 12:45
The surprise hit of 2022 was Top Gun: Maverick, a man and machine heroic picture, sentimental and nostalgic, the sort of thing Hollywood just doesn’t do anymore. At first glance it see… Read More
2023-02-02 12:56
“You know what your life is worth to you. And mine is worthless,” said Mitchell Tremblay, a 40-year-old Canadian man battling severe mental illness and intent on using his countr… Read More
2023-02-01 12:56
In a recent essay for the New York Times, American fashion designer Heather Kaye writes about raising her daughters in Shanghai and sending them to the Chinese public schools. Far from findi… Read More
2023-01-31 12:47
The biggest box office success in cinema history, strictly in dollars taken in, is Avatar, the 2009 movie that made 3D a technology audiences would finally flock to. The movie made some $785… Read More
2023-01-26 12:21
Thirty-five-year-old Viktor Cherniivaskyi is no stranger to pain. In August 2014, he was helping citizens escape a militarized zone, the product of mass Ukrainian protests, the ousting of Uk… Read More
2023-01-25 12:30
As the producers of the venerable James Bond franchise come to ponder how best to refurbish their hero for the uncertain times ahead—a woman, perhaps, and/or a person of color?—a… Read More
2023-01-24 14:50
Being fully human is complicated. Having a foot in both the material and spiritual worlds and with an originally good but fallen nature, our thoughts, motivations, and desires often come int… Read More
2023-01-19 12:49
If a Christian scholar has figured out a way to wrestle with critical theory through a biblical lens, that would be an important book. Unfortunately, Christopher Watkin’s Biblical Crit… Read More
2023-01-18 12:45
Six decades after its celebrated communist revolution, Cuba remains a totem for America’s left. Yet the country is imploding into irrelevance. Fidel Castro is dead and Raul Castro is r… Read More
2023-01-17 13:02
It is not a point of dispute that the Christian faith, both in influence and number of adherents, is declining in the Western world. Every month, new books, articles, podcasts, surveys, and… Read More
2023-01-12 12:49
The point of departure for Protestant Social Teaching: An Introduction is an observation set forth by Stephen J. Grabill in the pages of the Journal of Markets & Morality: “Neither… Read More
2023-01-11 12:30
There was a time when the Latin axiom “Memento Mori,” or its English translation, “Remember that thou art mortal,” actually meant something to people. For most of his… Read More
2023-01-10 17:49
Less than a month after Hong Kong adjourned democracy advocate Jimmy Lai’s trial, Beijing has stacked the deck even further against the jailed entrepreneur and freedom fighter.
After t… Read More
2023-01-10 12:44
With the December 31 passing of Pope Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church, Christianity, and the world lost one of the most significant and insightful minds of the last century. Certainly, with… Read More
2023-01-05 12:46
In his classic The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Michael Novak offers an observation about an ongoing struggle in a pluralistic society: the absence of a unified vision of the good. Conti… Read More
2023-01-04 12:29
Until a recent online debate, I hadn’t known about Kevin Nye, who has almost 15,000 followers on Twitter and a “housing first” plan to end homelessness. The man is clearly… Read More
2023-01-03 12:11
’Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,
Hard Times, hard times, come again no more.
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
Oh! Hard times come again no more. Continue Reading… Read More
2022-12-29 14:00
Last New Year’s Eve, I wrote about Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. It’s the best movie on the ambivalence with which we welcome the end of one year and the coming of a new on… Read More
2022-12-22 12:45
Michael Curtiz, famed director of Casablanca, made a Christmas movie in 1955, starring Humphrey Bogart, called We’re No Angels, about the power of innocence and moral decency to transf… Read More
2022-12-21 12:49
Americans are an individualistic bunch. Our popular culture makes heroes of outsiders, loners, and disrupters. Our politicians emphasize their independence of entrenched institutions, party… Read More
2022-12-20 13:47
When it comes to evaluating C.S. Lewis’ engagement with medieval authors, Jason Baxter performs the heavy lifting with ease, almost with wings. The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Gr… Read More
2022-12-15 13:12
Our current political reshuffling has been dizzying, perhaps even more in the Christian community than among Americans in general. The conservative shift toward populism under Trump empowere… Read More
2022-12-15 01:36
Entrepreneur and freedom fighter Jimmy Lai’s fight for justice will now drag on for nine more months as the Hong Kong High Court adjourns his trial.
The delay comes as Hong Kong waits… Read More
2022-12-14 13:05
In his essay “The Philosophy of Medieval Art,” Bishop Fulton Sheen opens with the statement, “There is no such thing as understanding the art in any period apart from the p… Read More
2022-12-13 13:25
Modern society has no shortage of candidates for substitute religions.
Instead of attending religious services, we can assemble at football games; in lieu of studying the lives of the saints… Read More
2022-12-12 13:39
Held in solitary confinement, 75-year-old Jimmy Lai is still awaiting trial for the crime of resisting the iron grip of the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong. On December 10, however, tha… Read More
2022-12-08 12:30
Martin Scorsese turned 80 last month and he deserves celebration. He’s one of perhaps five directors in Hollywood who is respected as a master of the cinematic art, and the one most cl… Read More
2022-12-07 12:49
On August 26, 2021, Stuart Scheller posted a video on LinkedIn and Facebook in which he strongly criticized senior U.S. military and civilian leaders for the embarrassing way in which the co… Read More
2022-12-06 12:28
“You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Continue Reading Read More
2022-12-02 20:10
Hong Kong freedom fighter Jimmy Lai was scheduled to go on trial this week for alleged crimes against China’s National Security Law. However, Hong Kong’s immigration department h… Read More
2022-12-01 12:47
The cruelty of the Iranian regime is on display daily. In July, Tehran initiated a crackdown on unveiled women, which two months later resulted in the death of Mahsa Amini, apparently f… Read More
2022-11-30 12:51
Free Market: The History of an Idea by Jacob Soll, a professor of history, philosophy, and accounting, attempts to trace the philosophical and theoretical evolution of the free market over 2… Read More
2022-11-29 12:38
Sometimes it seems as though the only things that exercise modern souls are sex, scandal, and sin, but all around us, every day, there are indications that a not-insignificant portion of the… Read More
2022-11-23 12:48
Barry Levinson was one of the most successful directors in America around 1990, when he made Avalon, an immigrant Thanksgiving movie trying to sum up the transformation of the American famil… Read More
2022-11-22 12:46
Two and half years ago, the police killing of George Floyd sparked rioting and heightened racial tensions across the United States, and many Americans began to hear the phrase “critica… Read More
2022-11-17 15:22
Mere days after bringing a veteran British litigator on his legal team, jailed Hong Kong entrepreneur Jimmy Lai is moving to halt the trial proceedings entirely.
In a pretrial interview, the… Read More
2022-11-17 12:51
At the beginning of the year, I wrote a piece for Acton on Elizabeth Holmes, the con artist behind Theranos, the fake tech startup promising a revolution in blood tests and, thus, the beginn… Read More
2022-11-16 13:00
Tom Stoppard’s new play, Leopoldstadt, is a triumph of the playwriting art. It’s also a triumph of marketing. That’s because its advertising and publicity campaign has sold… Read More
2022-11-15 11:51
As far as centuries go, the 20th was remarkable for many things, not least among which were wars fought on a scale unprecedented for their destructiveness, as well as convulsive debates abou… Read More
2022-11-13 16:56
Although 74-year-old media mogul and pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai faces life in prison under Beijing’s harsh National Security Law (NSL), he now has a new ally in his corner: veter… Read More
2022-11-10 14:04
At its best, a democratic polity ought to deal well with complexity, this complexity composed of clashing ideas and principles as well as the interests of multiple actors and stakeholders. S… Read More
2022-11-09 13:22
Almost two-thirds of Americans believe that distrust of government is a major barrier to solving issues in public life. As we witness a marked decline of faith in both the government and the… Read More
2022-11-08 12:53
I recently wrote about what has come of Disney, whose new Pinocchio seems to be all about getting rid of morality as we have understood it. Instead of learning that actions have consequences… Read More
2022-11-03 12:17
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) held its 20th national congress to chart its future direction and anoint Xi Jinping as leader-for-life. At least that’s what Xi plans. Xi lauded… Read More
2022-11-02 12:48
From sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton’s worries over “moral therapeutic deism” in their 2005 book, to the Pew Research Center’s documentation… Read More
2022-10-31 22:12
One day after pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai was found guilty of fraud charges, the U.S. Department of State responded to the verdict, condemning its “spurious fraud charges” a… Read More
2022-10-31 11:44
Halloween has somehow become a celebration of America becoming American, a New World unlike the Old World, a place where horror is a literary or cinematic genre rather than a memory—th… Read More
2022-10-29 12:59
In a blow to free speech, pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai has been found guilty of fraud by a court in Hong Kong as China works to stamp out dissent. District Court judge Stanley Chan said… Read More
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