Marvin Olasky is the chairman of Zenger House, which gives annual awards to journalists who write great articles with street-level reporting; the author of 30 books, including Moral Vision: Leadership from George Washington to Joe Biden; and an Acton Institute affiliate scholar.
Posts by Marvin Olasky
February 13, 2025
This year is the 150th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which guaranteed African Americans equal treatment in public transportation. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1883 declared the Act unconstitutional, saying it infringed on the ability of private companies and individuals to run their affairs as they wanted.
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January 20, 2025
As we look toward an inauguration on January 20, I think of Robert Altman’s movie
Nashville (1975) and its leadoff song: “We must be doing something right to last 200 years.”
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June 18, 2024
Happy centennial, Johan Huizinga! He wrote his famous history book,
The Waning of the Middle Ages, in 1919, but an English translation came out in 1924 and changed the way many thought about writing history.
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May 08, 2024
It happens in many careers. A person with a “Do not steal” moral standard enters an organization where, it seems, everyone steals. What then?
Most of us have heard of Harry S.
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April 16, 2024
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 movie watcher Hannah Long early this year called
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) the best western ever made: John Ford’s film makes the top 10 on just about everyone’s list.
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March 15, 2024
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 together, to constrain.” How can something that binds be liberating?
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February 27, 2024
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 iceberg breached five of the ship’s supposedly watertight compartments?
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February 01, 2024
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 wanted their driver, a Dalit (“untouchable”), to have a room.
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January 25, 2024
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 in northern Nigeria.
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January 15, 2024
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 single most quoted sentence is probably this: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
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