Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Public Policy

February 11, 2014

Science, Faith, and Our Place in The Universe

In Acton’s newly published monograph, Catholicism, Ecology, and the Environment, Bishop Dominique Rey explores the relationship between man and the created world. In the book’s foreword, written by Acton’s Director of Research Sam Gregg, Gregg summarizes the Catholic view of man’s relationship to created matter: Man is understood as intrinsically superior to the natural world. Continue Reading...
February 05, 2014

The Boring Work Of Development

Helping people get out of poverty is hard, dirty work. It isn’t glamorous. Most of those involved do not get to wander around the developing world wearing cool blue shades and giving sound bites. Continue Reading...
February 04, 2014

From Aid to Enterprise

Can the current model of humanitarian aid generated by networks of large philanthropic foundations, NGOs, and Western governments actually alleviate global poverty? The latest Liberty Law Talk podcast asks Acton’s Michael Miller, director of the new Poverty Cure Initiative, to address that question and to explain what conditions can lead to prosperity: As Miller discusses, the prevalent humanitarian aid model frequently uproots the very beginnings of the circles of exchange that must exist for wealth to be created in these societies. Continue Reading...
January 30, 2014

Discerning Between Service and Disservice

“‘I have the right to do anything,’ you say–but not everything is beneficial. ‘I have the right to do anything’–but not everything is constructive. No one should seek their own good, but the good of others” (1 Cor. Continue Reading...
January 28, 2014

Poverty, Development, and the Idealist

In the latest EconTalk podcast, Nina Munk, journalist and author of The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, talks about how she spent six years following Jeffrey Sachs and the evolution of the Millennium Villages Project — an attempt to jumpstart a set of African villages in hopes of discovering a new template for development. Continue Reading...
January 22, 2014

The Ever-Persistent, Always-Destructive Myth of Overpopulation

The Nordic philosopher and priest Anders Chydenius (1729-1803) — the “Adam Smith of the North” — once asked: Would the Great Master, who adorns the valley with flowers and covers the cliff itself with grass and mosses, exhibit such a great mistake in man, his masterpiece, that man should not be able to enrich the globe with as many inhabitants as it can support? Continue Reading...