Samuel Gregg is Distinguished Fellow in Political Economy and Senior Research Faculty at the American Institute for Economic Research and serves as affiliate scholar at the Acton Institute.
The world of medieval history suffered a great loss on November 30 with the death of Professor Brian Tierney. Widely recognized as a leading scholar of medieval Western Christianity and how church law and institutions affected the broader culture of Europe, Tierney wrote widely but also deeply on topics ranging from the origins of papal infallibility to how religion shaped the development of constitutionalism. Continue Reading...
Britain’s 2019 General Election is unusual for many reasons. It’s not odd for British religious leaders to express their views about what they think their congregants should consider before they go to the polls. Continue Reading...
The days in which many Westerners celebrated what many thought was mainland China’s inevitable march towards freedom as a consequence of its limited opening to global trade are now well and truly over. Continue Reading...
There’s rarely a day when China isn’t featured prominently in the news. Once upon a time, most of that coverage was about China’s rise out of poverty. Now, however, greater attention is being given to some decidedly negative developments. Continue Reading...
It is no great secret that one of the few institutions that has stood firm against the socialist Maduro dictatorship in Venezuela is the Catholic Church. Most other institutions have dissolved, broken or thoroughly compromised. Continue Reading...
It’s been a good week for the left throughout Latin America. In Columbia, center-left and left-wing parties did well in regional election. Argentina also took a left-turn with a left-wing Peronist easily winning the presidency, and bringing the former president Cristina Kirchner back to office as Vice-President. Continue Reading...
As we’ve seen in countries like Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua, Latin American left-leaning populists are quite content to work in democratic systems—until, that is, those systems start delivering results which they don’t like. Continue Reading...
It’s no secret that most of Latin America has struggled for a long time with the idea, habits, and practices of rule of law. When one consults rankings such as the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom (which measures for rule of law), it’s a depressing picture, despite notable exceptions like Chile. Continue Reading...
October 4th is the Feast Day of Francis of Assisi. He is surely one of the most famous Christian saints. A sense of his impact upon the world can be gauged by the fact that Francis was canonized by Pope Gregory IX just two years after his death in 1226. Continue Reading...
Since my book Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization appeared in June this year, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the reception.
The book seems to have touched upon topics that, while not at the forefront on daily political debate, are on many people’s minds and underlie some of the bigger questions that are to be found just beneath the surface of many contemporary discussions in Western countries. Continue Reading...
