Eric Metaxas’ golden triangle of freedom

We welcome guest writer Sam Webb to the PowerBlog with this review of If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty by Eric Metaxas (Viking, 2016). Webb is an attorney in Houston and studies at Reformed Theological Seminary. Continue Reading...

Samuel Gregg: Catholicism and the Enlightenment

Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg reviews a new book at the Library of Law and Liberty that demolishes the canard that religious figure were “somehow opposed holus bolus to Enlightenment ideas is one that has been steadily discredited over the last 50 years.” Continue Reading...

Cultural Depictions of Communism and Christianity

As the author of a book titled The Roots of Coincidence, Arthur Koestler would appreciate the coinky dinks of the past week. First, I finished re-reading Koestler’s two nonfiction works of 20th century European madness, Dialogue with Death and Scum of the Earth. Continue Reading...

Samuel Gregg: Russell Kirk and Twentieth-Century American Conservatism

At The Public Discourse, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg reviews Bradley J. Birzer’s new book Russell Kirk: American Conservative. The book, Gregg writes, amply shows how “Kirk’s broad scope of interests was matched by genuine erudition that enabled him to see the connections between, for instance, culture and American foreign policy, or the significance of moral philosophy for one’s commitments in the realm of political economy.” Continue Reading...

The Tragedy of ‘Mockingjay’

“Mockingjay — Part 2,” the last film based on Suzanne Collins’ bestselling Hunger Games trilogy, opened this past weekend to high sales that, nevertheless, fell short of the other films in the series and industry expectations. Continue Reading...

Gertrude Himmelfarb ‘Threads the Needle’ on Lord Acton Biography

Biographers suffer from a myriad of temptations. Gertrude Himmelfarb, in her bibliography to the newly republished Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics, recalls how Acton’s first biographer, Ulrich Noack struggled mightily to reconcile contradictions and tensions in Acton’s thought and in doing so lost much of the man himself. Continue Reading...