Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Book Reviews

September 21, 2022

Our Lady of the Artilects Makes AI Catholic Cool

The idea of personal identity and sentience in artificial intelligences (AI) is not exactly new territory for the science fiction genre: from Neuromancer to Westworld, writers frequently contemplate the ideas of agency and moral status in close-to-human, artificially engineered agents and environments. Continue Reading...
September 20, 2022

Progressives Remember COVID but Refuse to Learn from It

There are three ways to look back at the first year of the COVID pandemic. The first is to learn from the whole experience. Recall the fear, pain, and misery brought on by lockdowns, mask mandates, and social distancing, as well as the deaths that could have been prevented but weren’t because of politics (think the nursing home debacles). Continue Reading...
September 08, 2022

Remember the Cold War’s Witness

It was 70 years ago, 1952, that Whittaker Chambers published his memoir, Witness. It was a bestseller with a major impact, including on a future president who, more than any other figure, defeated the country that Chambers once served, winning the Cold War. Continue Reading...
September 07, 2022

Edmund Burke Can Still Inspire the American Right

It’s no secret that the modern American conservative movement is divided today. Issues like the role of government, the place of the nation-state, and the extent to which free markets should prevail in economic life have become major points of fracture across the right that seem unlikely to be resolved soon. Continue Reading...
August 16, 2022

Finding wisdom in Barack Obama fanfiction

This diatribe was inspired by the most amusing book I’ve ever encountered. While perusing the wares of a D.C. bookstore, I came across a tome entitled Hope Never Dies by New York Times bestselling author Andrew Shaffer, released in 2018. Continue Reading...