Acton Institute Powerblog

Promoting free societies characterized by liberty & religious principles

The gospel of humanitarianism

In The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity (Encounter Books, 2018), Daniel J. Mahoney confronts a central heresy of our age, the “remarkably truncated view of human beings” that fails to “acknowledge the hierarchy of goods and values that characterize the moral order and the life of the soul.” Continue Reading...

Scratching our way back from World War I

This year witnessed the centenary commemoration of the respective births of two champions of Christian thought and human liberty, Russell Kirk and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Both men were born coincidentally in the same time frame – October and December 1918 respectively – in which the “war to end all wars” ceased. Continue Reading...

The spiritual core of political hate

A new study confirms that creeping tribalism has Americans bitterly divided, acrimonious, and dismissive of others based on political differences. Behind this animosity lies a spiritual principle that Rev. Timothy Keller touched on during his address at this year’s Acton Institute annual dinner. Continue Reading...

Czeslaw Milosz: Poet Laureate of Freedom

[A review of Milosz: A Biography by Andrzej Franasszek, edited and translated by Aleksandra and Michael Parker, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge University, 2017, 526 pp., $35] “What is poetry which does not save/Nations or people?” Continue Reading...