Latest Posts

December 10, 2025

Ordering Our Loves for the Good of All

Earlier this year, Vice President J.D. Vance triggered quite a firestorm when he mentioned the Christian concept of ordo amoris, also known as the order of charity. “There’s this old-school—and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way—that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world,” Vance told Fox News host Sean Hannity. Continue Reading...
December 09, 2025

Rethinking Education in Africa: Lessons from Albert Jay Nock

Albert Jay Nock, the early-20th-century American social critic, offered a vision of education that challenged the prevailing assumptions of his time. He warned that mass schooling, designed primarily to transmit information and enforce conformity, often comes at the expense of independent judgment, moral imagination, and personal responsibility. Continue Reading...
December 04, 2025

The Economics of the Sacred: Politics as a Covenant Exercise

The lie that religion has no bearing on politics has yielded the kind of politics we have now: managerial, sterile, and devoid of moral conviction. The idea that political office could be a covenantal trust or that economic policy might have covenantal implications would strike most technocrats as medieval sentimentality; yet, the biblical worldview insists that public life is precisely where covenants are lived or broken. Continue Reading...
December 03, 2025

The Christmas Season as Gift

In her new book, The True Gifts of Christmas: Unwrapping the Meaning Behind Our Most Cherished Traditions, TV’s Megan Alexander shares the origin of her love for the Yuletide season and the meaning behind many of its most beloved traditions. Continue Reading...
December 02, 2025

Rev. Dr. Richard Turnbull: Scholar, Teacher, Friend

The Rev. Dr. Richard Turnbull, long-time friend of the Acton Institute, sadly died on November 26, not long after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Many friends, colleagues, and collaborators joined a Whatsapp group to pray for Richard and his family in his final weeks, and the affection and admiration that so many people had for him was clearly expressed over those weeks. Continue Reading...
November 26, 2025

Avalon Is Thanksgiving for America

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 family in the 20th century. Continue Reading...
November 25, 2025

Rage Against the Machine. Or Don’t.

It’s unusual to be in the situation of reviewing a book no one will like. I don’t mean that literally; a handful of people will appreciate Paul Kingsnorth’s new book, Against the Machine, probably the same people who have followed his work for the past decade. Continue Reading...
November 20, 2025

God Is Back from the Dead

In The Gay Science (1882), German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed the death of God. Recognizing the enormous implications of secularization and the uprooting of Christianity’s “fundamental concept” (faith in God) and the resulting moral confusion, he exclaimed: “God is dead! Continue Reading...
November 19, 2025

COVID and the Craving for Certainty

In March of 2020, I published an essay warning both the public and our policymakers against overreacting to the COVID threat. We overreact, I argued, in times of “epistemic uncertainty,” when we do not know enough about a threat we face and are unclear about our best response. Continue Reading...