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
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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August 16, 2023
Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) summarized what happened to George W. Bush’s 2001 anti-poverty “faith-based” initiative this way: It started out “with a certain merit, and you hope to God, literally, that you’re doing the right thing.
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July 19, 2023
My last entry in this series on the compassionate conservatism movement concluded with a question: Would John DiIulio, head of the George W. Bush administration’s faith-based office, insist that religion-based programs, to be eligible for federal grants, be devoid of religious teaching or evangelism?
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June 14, 2023
In 2000, I didn’t realize until it was too late that my astronomically exaggerated proximity to presidential candidate George W. Bush would make me a target. For example, I had said in 1998 that women volunteers had run charitable enterprises in the 19th century, so women’s entrance into the corporate workforce had hurt the nonprofit world.
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May 24, 2023
I’ve been a Christian for almost half a century, sometimes with a critical spirit toward sermons. So I’ll now write something I’ve never written before and never expect to write again: the best preacher I’ve ever heard “died” last Friday.
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