Rev. Ben Johnson is an Eastern Orthodox priest and served as executive editor of the Acton Institute from 2016 to 2021. His work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including National Review, the American Spectator, The Guardian, National Catholic Register, Providence, Jewish World Review, Human Events, and the American Orthodox Institute. His personal websites are therightswriter.com and RevBenJohnson.com. You can find him on X: @therightswriter.
Posts by Rev. Ben Johnson
July 03, 2019
The slate for the top positions in the European Union has been released, and the process of selecting candidates was nearly as discouraging as the nominees chosen. Ursula von der Leyen, who was chosen to become the next president of the European Commission, has particularly concerning views on economics.
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July 01, 2019
“Conservatism,” wrote Russell Kirk, “is the negation of ideology.” Kirk’s tradition rejects ideology, because “[t]he ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century world into a terrestrial hell.”
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June 28, 2019
As Religious Freedom Week comes to a close, a survey captures a striking result: Fewer Americans are committed to the right of religious liberty, yet Protestant pastors are less concerned about the issue than they have been in years.
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June 28, 2019
The Acton Institute has posted a new translation as part of its ongoing outreach to the French-speaking world. The article, “La montée du communisme dans des habits catholiques,” describes efforts to use Catholic rhetoric to promote the same statist aims once advanced by the former Communist Party in Eastern Europe.
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June 25, 2019
On September 14, 1974, economist Arthur Laffer and three friends had the most productive cocktail discussion in U.S. history. On that day, Laffer famously sketched his U-shaped theory of taxation on a cocktail napkin.
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June 24, 2019
If it were possible to localize all the pathologies undermining the West into a single incident, a court ruling handed down on Friday might serve as the one. A British judge has ordered a young Catholic woman with “moderately severe” learning disabilities to have a second-trimester abortion against her will, in a case filed by the publicly funded National Health Service.
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June 20, 2019
In the preamble to its constitution, the Industrial Workers of the World proclaimed that it would bring about socialism (which it dubbed “industrial democracy”) by “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”
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June 19, 2019
Proponents of a national health care system often describe the program as “all-inclusive.” However, a Canadian court ruling and a new U.S. congressional report show that single-payer health care could permanently exclude faithful Christians.
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June 18, 2019
The 313 Conservative MPs held the second round of voting to elect the new leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister of the United Kingdom. Each of the six remaining candidates – Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove, Dominic Raab, Sajid Javid, and Rory Stewart – had to receive at least 33 votes to advance to the next round.
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June 14, 2019
Senator Bernie Sanders has refused to grapple with the fact that socialist governments regularly suppress human rights and devolve into despotism, according to a social democrat from Germany. Even as Sanders proposed an economic “Bill of Rights” this week, he ignored the fact that civil liberties depend on preserving “private economic initiative,” the political scientist said.
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