Acton Commentary: OWS and the Lost Sheep
Religion & Liberty Online

Acton Commentary: OWS and the Lost Sheep

In this week’s Acton Commentary, I examine Jesus’s famous parable of the Lost Sheep in the context of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells the parable after some people grumble about him eating with “tax collectors and sinners.” Tax collectors at the time had a bad reputation of unfair business practices and government ties. Yet, Jesus tells the parable of a man who left ninety-nine sheep to find the one that went missing in order to caution his detractors about marginalizing even these tax collectors.

In light of this, does the “we are the 99%” rhetoric of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which implicitly insinuates that anyone in the top 1 percent has gotten there unjustly, amount to shunning the lost sheep (and others) of our society today? Read this week’s Acton Commentary for more.

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Unported Author: Another Believer

Dylan Pahman

Dylan Pahman, Ph.D., is a research fellow at the Acton Institute and founder and president of the St. Nicholas Cabasilas Institute. He is author of The Kingdom of God and the Common Good: Orthodox Social Thought (Ancient Faith, 2025) and Foundations of a Free Society & Virtuous Society (Acton, 2017). With John Pinheiro, he is also coeditor of The Christian Roots of American Liberty (Acton, forthcoming in 2026), a sourcebook charting the prehistory of American founding principles through the ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds.