2024-04-23 11:54
Trendy title aside, Tyler Cowen’s new book, GOAT: Who Is the Greatest Economist of All Time and Why Does It Matter?,is a mini masterpiece. Cowen takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of… 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.
2024-04-19 12:07
A few weeks ago, cultural critic and jazz musician Ted Gioia wrote a must-read essay that lays out today’s dismal cultural situation. His thesis: “2024 may be the most fast-paced… Read More
2024-04-18 11:53
The new film Civil War may want to be edgy, timely, even thoughtful, but it has nothing to offer beyond surface-level thrills, which makes its grisly portrayal of war feel more like a romant… Read More
2024-04-17 11:46
We all know that person who always seems to have the latest Apple gadget. In many ways, Apple products have become a status symbol. While there is a dedicated and loyal group of Apple fans w… Read More
2024-04-16 11:43
I’ve watched hundreds of westerns over the years, and 48 years ago even wrote my doctoral dissertation on the politics of the genre from 1948 to 1962. I wasn’t surprised when mov… Read More
2024-04-12 12:04
He would, of course, have blanched—or barfed—if you had ever addressed him that way (probably the only blasphemy he’d refuse to utter). Yet is it really any more outlandish… Read More
2024-04-11 12:07
At the Fine Arts Theater in Beverly Hills, I recently attended the premiere of a new documentary, co-produced by Substack and FIRE, that attempts to explain the mental health crisis facing c… Read More
2024-04-10 11:56
Given that contemporary pop music is stagnant, Beyoncé’s country-inspired album Cowboy Carter was bound to be something of a sensation. Its chief significance is not aesthetic&m&hell…Read More
2024-04-09 12:12
Tom Hanks was the moral conscience of America in the ’90s, so far as Hollywood was concerned, and audiences largely concurred, because he’s like a new Jimmy Stewart: he exudes mo… Read More
2024-04-03 12:03
My library, a relatively small one by university standards, has over 150 books dealing with Winston Churchill, one of the Big Four of World War II, which included FDR, Stalin, and Hitler. Co… Read More
2024-04-02 12:18
Ambiguity is, in a neat mental onomatopoeia, a difficult word to define. But to begin to understand a piece of art like the film Freud’s Last Session, define it we must, and religious… Read More
2024-04-01 12:03
David L. Bahnsen’s new book, Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life, proposes a counterintuitive, if not contrarian, thesis. An extremely successful businessman (his firm, The Bahnsen… Read More
2024-03-28 11:51
While the long 19th century gave birth to a variety of intellectual movements, it also saw its fair share of anti-intellectualism. The fallout from the Second Great Awakening was one such ex… Read More
2024-03-27 12:11
How can principled conservatives reunite a fractured coalition? The ties that once bound the various parties on the right have frayed and, in some cases, snapped. The authors of Fight the Go… Read More
2024-03-26 11:55
Thinkers from nearly every intellectual tradition agree that we live in an age when ideology dominates public life. Who or what we can accurately label as ideological is as essentially conte… Read More
2024-03-22 11:59
For the past two and a half years, Republicans have used the phrase “Let’s Go Brandon” as shorthand for a profane phrase that begins with an “F” and ends with t… Read More
2024-03-21 11:47
When contemporary transhumanists like Yuval Noah Harari speak about future migrations and amalgamations of human consciousness, they generally preface their ideas with outright dismissals of… Read More
2024-03-19 11:54
In nearly every era prior to our own, the links between sex, marriage, and children were considered a given, not a state of affairs to be questioned, let alone altered. Not so today, as the… Read More
2024-03-15 12:01
The name of the Acton Institute’s magazine, Religion and Liberty, seems to many people an oxymoron. The word “religion” apparently emerged from religare, “to bind tog… Read More
2024-03-14 12:14
People around the world are grossly misinformed about the nature and character of government. They do not understand the need for limits on government for it to remain a useful instrument an… Read More
2024-03-13 12:13
“Humans are not well-suited to radical immanence.” After all, those who believe only in what they can see are still made in the image of God and possess a supernatural purpose ev… Read More
2024-03-12 11:16
After a silence of nearly 60 years, following her untimely death from lupus, Flannery O’Connor’s hitherto-unpublished prose rises from the page like one of her own fictional epip… Read More
2024-03-08 12:20
Jonathan Glazer has been nominated for two Oscars, as writer and director of The Zone of Interest, a movie about Nazis that was also nominated for Best Picture and Best International Film. C… Read More
2024-03-07 13:23
Officially retired and well into his 90s, Thomas Sowell shows no signs of intending to stop helping the world understand social questions at the intersection of politics and economics. The k… Read More
2024-03-06 13:14
Those who went to Dune: Part Two expecting a happy ending must have left the theater rather confused. For those unfamiliar with Frank Herbert’s groundbreaking sci-fi novels, the story… Read More
2024-03-05 12:50
“Was the richest person in the world overpaid?” asked Delaware chancellor Kathaleen Saint Jude McCormick, the judge who decided he was, and then invalidated Elon Musk’s $56… Read More
2024-03-01 13:11
Based on the numbers of the latest Religious Freedom Index from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, religious Americans may have reason to worry about Gen Z (those in the age range of 12… Read More
2024-02-29 13:17
Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up is not really about therapy. Instead, it’s about parents who let competitors for their authority usurp their ro… Read More
2024-02-28 12:36
Over the course of two seasons, the action series Reacher on the Amazon Prime streaming service has lured in viewers for its vigorous action, surprising storylines, and vigilante vision of t… Read More
2024-02-27 13:01
Is the power-seeking now prominent in evangelical circles a fever or a fatal disease? Is the evangelical movement unsinkable, or is it like the Titanic in 1912 after a collision with an iceb… Read More
2024-02-22 12:15
One hundred and ninety-nine years ago today, a local paper out of Ripley, Ohio, published the final installment of a series of letters written by the Reverend John Rankin. They were addresse… Read More
2024-02-21 12:34
I once took a public sector job where I had oversight (though not formal supervisory responsibilities) over several personnel who had more years experience than I had. One such employee was… Read More
2024-02-20 12:30
I remember looking at all the social media reactions of critics and friends who had seen Oppenheimer, now up for a Best Picture Oscar. So many of them described walking out of the movie &ldq&hell…Read More
2024-02-16 12:47
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)… Read More
2024-02-15 13:22
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 s… Read More
2024-02-14 13:19
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… Read More
2024-02-13 12:05
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 ne… Read More
2024-02-09 13:06
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 t… Read More
2024-02-08 12:51
Michael Mann is famous for crime dramas like Thief (1981), Heat (1995), and Collateral (2004) that suggest that only criminals can be free, since the rest of us are constantly bossed around… Read More
2024-02-07 12:48
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 rhetoric… Read More
2024-02-06 13:05
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, equi… Read More
2024-02-02 12:24
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… Read More
2024-02-01 13:18
Last month I wrote about John M. Perkins, who is black, and wealthy philanthropist Howard Ahmanson, who is white. Forty years ago, together in a hotel near the Mumbai, India, airport, they w… Read More
2024-01-31 12:29
First Amendment scholar Michael McConnell may have understated the case when he wrote that “the free exercise clause may well be the most philosophically interesting and distinctive fe… Read More
2024-01-30 12:58
Being a Christian in ancient Rome was not easy. Stories and legends of the martyrs of this period are not for the faint of heart. Recall that, according to tradition, only one of the 12 apos… Read More
2024-01-26 12:19
Americans are killing themselves in record numbers. According to a study published in August by the Kaiser Family Foundation, between 2011 and 2022, more than half a million lives were lost… Read More
2024-01-25 19:05
Last fall and into January so far, the big three U.S. newspapers—the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal—have not covered new massacres of Christians… Read More
2024-01-25 12:13
David Leonhardt is in a rare category of writers these days—a center-left moderate progressive at a dominant media outlet (the New York Times) who often upset left-wingers for telling… Read More
2024-01-24 13:43
We live in a culture where many believe that the claims of their emotional lives trump all other considerations. This sentimental understanding of the self is driven by our culture’s o… Read More
2024-01-23 12:51
Synagogues and Jewish schools targeted by firebombings and shootings. Muslims attacked outside their mosque. Dozens of churches burned to the ground. Headlines like these over the past few m… Read More
2024-01-19 12:44
Whenever I read a story involving one of the profusion of holy relics preserved and exhibited over the centuries, whether it be the Shroud of Turin or the finger bone of the fifth-century pa… Read More
2024-01-18 13:05
When tasked with reviewing Jennifer Burns’ Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, I was unaware that I was going to read one of the most engaging works of intellectual history I have… Read More
2024-01-17 12:42
Babel: Or The Necessity of Violence, An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators Revolution is a pernicious novel showcasing the ability of literature to make evil appear good. Evaluating Ba… Read More
2024-01-15 13:18
We celebrate the January 15, 1929, birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. on the Monday closest to his birthday every year—and this year that Monday is today, January 15. King’s sing… Read More
2024-01-12 13:01
“When you speak to customers, don’t let them know you are the owners.” This was the advice given to my wife and me by the previous owners when we bought a business in 2020… Read More
2024-01-11 13:19
Beginning in mid-October, Panamanian activists, led by the militant leftist labor union SUNTRACS, brought much of Panama to a standstill, blocking roads and filling Panama City with daily de… Read More
2024-01-10 12:46
Four decades ago, the American director Robert Aldrich made the most cheerful, companionable, and charitable movie ever produced about professional wrestling. Against all expectations, Aldri… Read More
2024-01-09 13:02
If you wanted to capture the current conservative mood—a surefire way to sell books—you would write a despairing jeremiad that extrapolates from every worrying trend. James Petho… Read More
2024-01-05 13:09
My favorite back-to-school reading this year has been Alex Priou’s Musings on Plato’s Symposium. I hurry to add that I’ve long been out of school, but I did pick up the hab… Read More
2024-01-04 13:05
Tim Alberta’s new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, opens with the death of his father, Richard Alberta, an evangelical ministe… Read More
2024-01-03 13:12
One of the most telling quotes I’ve heard regarding the conservative movement on racial issues comes from political commentator Candace Owens’ Twitter bio: “Black people do… Read More
2023-12-28 13:53
Dante’s purpose in writing the Divine Comedy is placed in the mouth of Virgil a mere 76 lines into Canto I of the Inferno. The poet questions his charge’s malaise at his seemingl… Read More
2023-12-27 13:09
Universal basic income (UBI), freedom dividends, permanent fund dividends, guaranteed income … these are all names that have been used over the past 200 years to describe the same ess… Read More
2023-12-25 19:38
As we deck the halls with boughs of holly this year, read the story of Christ’s Nativity, sing hymns and carols, exchange gifts, and light our homes in increasingly irrational competit… Read More
2023-12-22 13:30
Every Christmas, I try to write about Christmas movies, especially about old Hollywood, because the best directors at the time considered it worthwhile to make movies that would chastise and… Read More
2023-12-21 13:00
Harvey Mansfield recently retired from his position at Harvard University after a long and storied career. He’s almost an institution himself, well-known for hard grading, demanding te… Read More
2023-12-20 13:10
Let me begin where I’ll also end: Nadya Williams’ latest book, Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan), is a masterful exercise in historical research, a compelling p… Read More
2023-12-19 13:12
On February 24, 1807, the House of Commons voted by 283 votes to 16 to end the trade in human slaves in all British territories. The outcome was testimony to the tenacity, zeal, and commitme… Read More
2023-12-18 16:51
Jimmy Lai is no ordinary political protester. The 76-year-old Hong Kong entrepreneur and newspaper publisher has sat in solitary confinement in 35-pound handcuffs for more than 1,000 days as… Read More
2023-12-15 12:44
Nothing guarantees that a country will remain prosperous forever. President Reagan stated that “we are never more than one generation away” from doing lasting damage to the prima… Read More
2023-12-14 13:15
When it comes to film genres, the kinds, the sorts, the categories of picture defined by certain conventions and characteristics, we’re all familiar with sci fi, the western, the detec… Read More
2023-12-13 12:50
Sociologist Robert Nisbet declared our era to be “singularly weak” in social inventiveness. In a new book on local solutions to America’s social ills, author Seth Kaplan ag… Read More
2023-12-12 13:14
The 20th century was an outlier in the history of the human race. For the first time, secularizing movements spanned the globe. In many places, they succeeded by suppressing the political ex… Read More
2023-12-08 13:19
Fulton Sheen once remarked that “not over a hundred people” hate the Catholic Church, but “there are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholi… Read More
2023-12-07 12:59
In Finland, a prominent politician and a Lutheran bishop have been acquitted of hate crimes for the second time in as many years. On November 14, 2023, the Helsinki Court of Appeals issued i… Read More
2023-12-06 13:38
He knows. This John knows. How? Has he peered down into the bottomless pit in the middle of the Wilderness? Seen the Stranger trapped in a small iron Cage lowered on a long iron chain so far… Read More
2023-12-05 13:01
Among all art forms, the movies have the greatest propensity to glorify violence, brutality, and savagery of all sorts. Because the medium is inherently kinetic, cinema captures the thrill… Read More
2023-12-01 13:07
Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age makes a compelling argument. Its author, Samuel James, asks readers to consider how long it’s been since they’v… Read More
2023-11-30 12:44
In Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal, Matt Martens has written an indispensable guide for Christians engaging with questions of criminal justice reform. While Dagan and Teles… Read More
2023-11-28 12:42
In his introduction essay to Up from Conservatism, a collection of essays by “New Right” authors, editor Arthur Milikh remarks that “the goal of this volume is to correct t… Read More
2023-11-23 13:31
Each night, when it’s my turn to tuck in my littlest kids—Erin (5) and Callaghan (3) … and sometimes Aidan (6)—we say the same traditional prayers together: the &ldq&hell…Read More
2023-11-22 13:21
It was a night that would live in infamy. The great debater and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis was defeated by a woman—and a young Roman Catholic upstart philosopher at that.
Except th… Read More
2023-11-21 12:58
The publicists at the BBC weren’t thrilled, one imagines, when their Doctor Who leading man spoke candidly about why he loved the program so much. “People always ask me, ‘W… Read More
2023-11-17 13:01
Hannah More (1745–1833) was a most extraordinary woman. A poet and playwright mixing with the leading figures of her day in the theater and arts, she found evangelical faith and deploy… Read More
2023-11-16 12:33
The tyrannical collusion between global and corporate elites and the U.S. government leaves us teetering on the edge of losing everything and owning nothing, according to Carol Roth in her n… Read More
2023-11-15 12:51
I’ve been rereading Milton’s Paradise Lost. I am not alone in this; earlier this year, every time I checked Twitter, someone was commenting on Paradise Lost. There seemed to be a… Read More
2023-11-14 12:38
True art is a hard sell in an era in which media is predominant. Today, successful media is immediate, snappy, flashy, pervasive, and geared toward influencing the public to buy something an… Read More
2023-11-10 12:58
“In fact, the fundamental claim of this book is that if one believes the world actually is intelligible—that things make sense, and ultimate explanation can be had—then God… Read More
2023-11-09 13:15
Forty years ago, the philosopher and novelist Walker Percy published what is easily the strangest book of his writing career. Lost in the Cosmos distills the major themes of both his novels… Read More
2023-11-08 12:48
Up until a few decades ago, it was common to think of the United States as a melting pot. People from all over the world would come to this great country, adopt American values, and learn En… Read More
2023-11-07 13:17
On the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Yom Kippur War, Hamas launched an attack on Israel, killing more than 1,500 people and taking hostages, committing, filming, and publicizing o… Read More
2023-11-03 12:01
The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (SFFA), which invalidated the use of race as a criterion for… Read More
2023-11-02 12:11
This three-part series on race and the right began with a look at some truly telling statistics about how badly American conservatives are doing at taking on racial issues. Politically, 85%… Read More
2023-11-01 11:50
With magnifying glass in hand, a budding naturalist can learn a great deal about ants scuttling around the driveway. Were the ants to glance upward, however, they might learn even more about… Read More
2023-10-31 12:02
Business and educational entrepreneur Robert L. Luddy is a conservative Catholic who embraces dynamism and adaptability in bringing visions to life. Thales Academy is one such vision. In his… Read More
2023-10-27 12:26
Set in the opening decade of the current millennium, Elliot Ackerman’s Halcyon is a tale based on many alternative historical events—most notably, that Al Gore won the 2000 elect… Read More
2023-10-26 12:02
What do we think about when we think about Martin Scorsese? Many of us think about gangster stories, especially ultra-violent, grisly, and operatic ones. He helped bring the genre into the m… Read More
2023-10-25 11:38
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), in which the majority of the court ruled that the Constitution supports a right to marry for same-sex couple… Read More
2023-10-24 12:14
Our world is suffering a deep unrest. The term “civil war” has been thrown around more than once in reference to the deep divide that seems too broad to risk crossing. Continue R… Read More
2023-10-20 10:39
Louis Menand wrote a curious article for the New Yorker called “The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism.” The article is curious on two fronts: First, though published in a progressiv… Read More
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