Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'Samuel Gregg'

September 18, 2019

Samuel Gregg on ‘The specter of scientism’

In this week’s Acton Commentary, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg looks at how “scientism” treats the scientific method as the only way of knowing anything and everything. Without dismissing the real achievements of modern science, he notes that “one side-effect of these triumphs was that some began treating the empirical sciences as the only form of true reason and the primary way to discern true knowledge … ” Notwithstanding these serious flaws with scientism, its acceptance has two effects on a society. Continue Reading...
July 16, 2018

How politics becomes religion

In his new article for the Catholic World Report, Samuel Gregg, Research Director for the Acton Institute, argues that many in the world today have replaced politics with religion.  One result of this is disproportionate outrage and scandal over political events, such as Brett Kavanaugh’s recent nomination to the United States Supreme Court. Continue Reading...
November 03, 2017

Edmund Burke, free marketer

It’s not just millennials and other young people who are souring on free markets (44 percent according to a new poll) — there’s also a growing disenchantment among some conservatives. Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg explains the conservative angst as rooted, among other things, in the threat that upheaval in market economies presents to the “permanency, order, tradition, and strong and rooted communities.” Continue Reading...
September 20, 2017

Samuel Gregg: ‘First Things,’ R.R. Reno, and the market economy

The role of free market economics in the West should not be off-limits for debate among religious conservatives. As Samuel Gregg writes in a new essay, that standard should “provide philosophical and theological guidance about how to ground free economies—and liberal institutions more generally—upon more solid foundations than the peculiar mixes of utilitarianism, autonomy-for-autonomy’s sake, and pseudo-evolutionary theory advocated by some liberal thinkers.” Continue Reading...
June 19, 2017

Liberalism in all things except liberalism

Samuel Gregg, director of research at the Acton Institute, recently published a review of Maurice Cowling’s 1963 book Mill and Liberalism, in which Cowling warns of the tendency towards “moral totalitarianism” in John Stuart Mill’s “religion of liberalism.”  Continue Reading...
June 14, 2017

Radio Free Acton: Wonder Woman’s heartfelt humanity; Samuel Gregg on the UK elections

We’re back with a fresh edition of Radio Free Acton! This week, we talk with Acton’s Director of Research Samuel Gregg for some perspective on the surprising outcome of the June 8 snap parliamentary elections in Great Britain, and what the resurgence of Labour and the loss of a conservative majority mean for Prime Minister Theresa May and the upcoming Brexit negotiations with the EU. Continue Reading...