Nearly a century later, a different kind of flood washed through Minneapolis. No levees broke. No homes were lost to the current. The water, in this case, was money. A torrent of federal dollars released in the name of feeding hungry children during the COVID-19 pandemic. By the time the waters receded, something on the order of a quarter of a billion dollars had been diverted into the pockets of a sprawling conspiracy of restaurateurs, nonprofit operators, and middlemen who invented the hungry children, invented the meals, and very nearly invented their way into permanent immunity from scrutiny.

On the latest episode of Acton Line, my colleague Caleb Whitmer sits down to walk through what he has been calling, with a wry precision the subject deserves, the story of “fraud and flood.”

The temptation, when reading about a fraud of this magnitude, is to reach for the language of villainy. Here are the bad actors; here is the prosecutor; here, in the satisfying final act, is the verdict. Whitmer resists that temptation, and so does the conversation. The story he tells is less courtroom drama than civic anatomy. How, he keeps asking, did a federal program designed in compassion become a vehicle for plunder? What does it say about the architecture of American welfare administration that the fraud was so easy, so brazen, and so invisible to the people charged with watching it?

The answer is uncomfortable, and it has nothing to do with the unique wickedness of any individual. Floods of money, like floods of water, find every crack. Loosen the oversight in the name of urgency and during the pandemic, urgency was the universal solvent.

There is a long Catholic tradition, running through St. Thomas and reaching back to Aristotle, that distinguishes between pity and mercy. Pity is the sentiment that recoils at suffering; mercy is the virtue that orders one’s response to it. Pity, undisciplined, can do tremendous harm. It writes the check without asking who is cashing it. Mercy, by contrast, has eyes. It asks the unfashionable questions: Who is this for? Is the help reaching them? Are we, in our hurry to do good, building the next scandal?

Whitmer’s analysis, and his conversation on Acton Line, is in this tradition. He is not interested in scoring points against the welfare state, nor in defending it from its critics. He is interested in the harder thing, in what a serious Christian engagement with public administration looks like when the cameras are off and the spreadsheets are open. His analysis is the kind of work the Acton Institute exists to support: patient, granular, morally serious, and refusing the lazy shortcuts of either populist outrage or technocratic complacency.

The 1927 flood, Barry argued, marked a turning point in American political life. It exposed the limits of local response, accelerated the growth of federal authority, and set in motion a chain of consequences that ran through the New Deal and beyond. What the Minneapolis fraud affair will turn out to mark is harder to say. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps a renewed seriousness about the design of public programs. Perhaps, more darkly, a further erosion of the trust on which any welfare state, modest or expansive, finally depends.

Listen to the full conversation on Acton Line: “Caleb Whitmer: Fraud and Flood — Cataclysmic Money in Minneapolis.” The video is here.

Where it has taken root (with fascinating exceptions) the soil has been Christian.

This is an unfashionable claim in 2026, and what makes it unfashionable is instructive. Two camps with little else in common share a strong interest in severing American liberty from its Christian inheritance. Secular progressives wish to do so in order to liberate the American project from what they regard as parochial constraint. postliberal Catholics and Christian nationalists wish to do so in order to expose the American project as a Lockean Trojan horse smuggling Enlightenment subjectivism into Christendom. The conclusions diverge wildly. The premise is the same: that the American founding can be cleanly cut from the long Christian reflection on conscience, law, and the limits of political authority that preceded it.

It cannot. And on the latest episode of Acton Line, my colleagues Dylan Pahman and John C. Pinheiro patiently explain why.

Their project, documenting the Christian roots of American liberty, is not an exercise in apologetics. It is an exercise in historical recovery. The two distinguish themselves admirably from the loudest voices in this debate by refusing the temptation either to claim too much or to concede too much. They do not argue that America was a baptized polity, nor do they argue that it was a secular accident with religious frosting applied after the fact. They argue, with documents in hand, that the moral and intellectual habits that made ordered liberty thinkable in 1776 were habits cultivated over centuries of Christian engagement with classical sources, canon law, scholastic philosophy, Reformation doctrines of conscience, and the long argument over what the things that are Caesar’s and the things that are God’s.

Acton put the matter unforgettably. “When Christ said: ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,’ those words, spoken on his last visit to the Temple, three days before his death, gave to the civil power, under the protection of conscience, a sacredness it had never enjoyed, and bounds it had never acknowledged.” That is not a sectarian observation. It is a historical one. The bounding of political authority by something higher than itself is the precondition of any liberty worth the name, and the bounding of political authority by something higher than itself was, in the West, the work of the Church.

Pahman, an Orthodox theologian, and Pinheiro, a Catholic historian, bring complementary gifts to this work. Pinheiro’s earlier writing on Pope Leo XIII showed how the careful distinction between true and false liberalism allowed the Church to defend human freedom without surrendering to rationalism, atomism, or contempt for tradition. The same disposition animates this conversation. There is a liberalism that is, in Wilhelm Röpke’s phrase, “specifically Catholic” in its social philosophy: organic, deferential to mediating institutions, and alert to the dignity of persons. There is also a liberalism that is none of those things. To collapse the distinction is to lose both the criticism worth making and the inheritance worth defending.

Pahman, for his part, has done sustained work on what Christian social thought actually requires of a free economy and a free polity. His instincts run away from abstraction and toward concrete description. The Christian roots of American liberty are not a slogan for him but a continuing tradition recorded in texts, councils, magistrates, dissenters, charters, and arguments that can be named and footnoted. The recovery he and Pinheiro are undertaking is therefore not vulnerable to the standard objection that this is all sentimental civic religion. It is documentary work.

This kind of project matters now, beyond the partisans of either side of our current debates.

A republic that does not know what produced it cannot defend what it has. The American settlement is, as Acton suspected of all settlements, imperfect. But it is also the most durable working approximation of ordered liberty that has yet been achieved at scale, and it was not produced by a generation of pure rationalists or a generation of pure theocrats. It was produced by men and women who had inherited a long argument and were prepared to continue it. That argument predates John Locke by a millennium. It includes Augustine on the two cities, Aquinas on natural law, the late Scholastics at Salamanca on the just price and the rights of conscience, the English common law tradition with its theological underwriting, and the Reformation insistence that the conscience cannot finally be coerced. Cut any of these strands and the rope frays.

This is also why the project is unlikely to satisfy either of the camps I mentioned at the outset. The secular progressive will find too much Christianity in it. The integralist will find too much liberty in it. So much the better. The honest reader, of whatever conviction, will find what Pahman and Pinheiro are after: a serious attempt to describe the actual genealogy of American liberty rather than a tendentious attempt to claim it or denounce it.

There is a final reason to listen to this episode of Acton Line. The work of recovery is itself a kind of apprenticeship in the virtues that produced what is being recovered. To sit with sources, to make distinctions, to refuse easy synthesis, to hold authority and free inquiry together rather than playing one against the other—these are habits of mind, and they were cultivated, before they were ours, in cloisters and cathedral schools and dissenting congregations. We do not have to share the faith of those who cultivated them to recognize the debt, but we should not pretend the debt does not exist.

Acton’s unwritten history of liberty would, I suspect, have made just this point. Pahman and Pinheiro are doing some of the work he left undone.

Listen to the full conversation on Acton Line:

🎥 YouTube 🎧 Acton.org show notes and audio

Most of our talk about civilization is about how it will END, and how soon, and why, and who’s to blame. These days, everything the public frets about gets elevated to where it has to be seen as an “existential threat” to civilization.

I think I know where that started, because I was seven in 1945 when the Japanese city of Hiroshima was destroyed by a single bomb.

Hiroshima and then the Cold War introduced a new idea to humanity—that we had the power to destroy the world.

My youth was poisoned at times by that dread.

…

A massive nuclear war now would be horrible. World War Two taught us how horrible it can be. It taught us that civilization would be traumatized… and then it would rise from the ashes.

Nuclear war now would not make civilization cease to exist.

Neither will mass extinction or climate change or artificial intelligence, serious as they are. In the coming decades, there will certainly be various kinds of calamities, and we will keep on surviving them and learning from them.

Our planet has been through a lot, yet Earth abides.

Humanity has been through a lot, yet we abide.

…

Civilization as a human practice has carried on steadily, progressively, in a variety of forms, ever since the first cities.

Civilizations come and go. Civilization continues.

Stewart Brand, “Unending World” (2024).

On the latest episode of Acton Line, Jeffrey Polet joins the program to consider the philosophy of Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It is a conversation worth the attention of anyone who has ever wondered whether the word “leadership,” so heavily freighted by the self-help industry, might still be made to carry something more substantial.

McChrystal’s recent writing on character is not the usual leadership-aisle fare at the airport bookstore. It is a genuine meditation on the formation of the soul that draws from classical sources older and deeper than any service manual. That alone sets it apart from most of what passes for reflection on the subject, which tends to reduce the question of how to lead to a handful of techniques, a checklist of traits, or a personal brand to be curated.

Polet, a careful reader of the Western tradition, situates McChrystal within a lineage that stretches back through Aristotle and Aquinas. Character, on this account, is not a private possession or a matter of self-styling but a habit of the heart, forged slowly in the company of others. It is the sort of thing one acquires by imitation, repetition, and the patient correction of those who have walked the road before. It cannot be downloaded, streamed, or otherwise fast-tracked.

One of the most striking themes of the conversation is the necessity but insufficiency of rules. Institutions that try to replace judgment with procedure eventually hollow themselves out. Rules are indispensable and no army, no firm, no parish can operate without them, but they cannot do the work that only prudence can do. Ultimately virtue cannot be outsourced to a compliance department.

Polet points to where McChrystal grapples with this tension, and he explores the uneven results of the general’s thinking through these issues. McChrystal is not a philosopher, and Polet is too honest a reader to pretend otherwise. Yet the attempt is admirable, and it highlights the unique perspective a soldier can bring to these questions. Those who have commanded in extremis know something about the limits of procedure that those of us who have only written about such matters can know only secondhand. The classroom and the command tent are different schools, and the tradition is richer for admitting both.

It is no small thing for a man of McChrystal’s career to sit with the older questions. That he does so, even unevenly, is itself a witness worth considering.

A thoughtful conversation, well worth an hour. Listen to the full episode of Acton Line with Jeff Polet wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube:

Prices feel out of reach, mortgage rates have fluctuated wildly, and supply in major metro areas is severely constrained. When faced with a crisis of this magnitude, people look for a villain. Lately, that villain has been “institutional investors”, the large, faceless Wall Street firms allegedly buying up all the single-family homes and pricing ordinary Americans out of the market.

But is that narrative actually true?

On the latest episode of the Acton Line podcast, I sat down with Jason Sorens, Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) and principal investigator on the New Hampshire Zoning Atlas, to find out.

We looked at the hard economic data driving the housing market, evaluated the bipartisan policies currently on the table, and discussed what it will actually take to build a future of housing abundance.

Here are a few key takeaways from our conversation:

The Institutional Investor Myth

It’s easy to point the finger at big corporations, but the data tells a different story. Jason points out that large institutional investors (those owning more than 100 homes) actually own less than 1% of the single-family housing stock nationally.

Furthermore, they aren’t just sitting on empty houses; they are heavily involved in the “build-to-rent” market. By adding to the supply of single-family rentals, they are socio-economically integrating neighborhoods and driving down the cost of rent. While they might marginally increase the purchase price of homes, their overall impact on the market provides vital liquidity and housing access for families who might not qualify for a traditional mortgage.

Navigating the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act

We also dove into the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Like most sweeping legislation, it’s a mixed bag.

On the plus side, the bill attempts to leverage federal transportation dollars, moving them away from heavily-regulated, NIMBY-heavy cities and toward municipalities that actually permit and build new housing. It also includes sensible deregulations for manufactured housing.

However, the bill also attempts to ban large institutional investors from owning single-family homes for more than seven years. As Jason notes, this would effectively kill the build-to-rent market, pulling crucial supply out of the ecosystem and making the overarching problem even worse.

The Real Culprit: Local Zoning

If Wall Street isn’t to blame, who is?

THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE.

The primary barriers to affordable housing are local zoning regulations, permitting delays, and restrictive building codes that make it illegal or prohibitively expensive to build dense, affordable housing where people actually want to live. Jason’s work on the National Zoning Atlas is crucial here, providing everyday citizens with the data they need to show up at local township meetings and advocate for pro-growth, pro-abundance reforms.

Practical Advice for Navigating the Market

We closed our conversation with something every citizen has to grapple with: how to be a savvy consumer when you just need a place to live. Jason offered incredibly practical advice, from utilizing cost-of-living data to geographic flexibility, to renting in a new market for a few years before rushing into a purchase.

Housing will always cost money, but by aligning our policies with economic realities rather than political scapegoating, we can get back to a market that serves ordinary families.

Watch the full episode here: Jason Sorens Builds a Case for Reforming American Housing Policy

I’ve been thinking about that letter a lot in recent weeks, watching Pope Leo XIV navigate the same impossible terrain. A pope calling for peace while the machinery of war grinds forward with observers on all sides reading his words as if they were campaign talking points rather than what they actually are: an assertion of Catholic moral teaching.

That’s the argument I make in my new essay for The Dispatch’s Dispatch Faith newsletter, published today: “Pope Leo’s Case Against the Iran War Is Not Political.”

The essay traces a line from John Paul II’s Gulf War correspondence through to Leo XIV’s Palm Sunday homily and his pointed response to President Trump’s threat against the Iranian people, a threat the pope called “truly unacceptable.” Along the way, I set these papal interventions against a striking counterpoint: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s prayer at the Pentagon for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Both men claim to follow Jesus Christ. The distance between their visions is striking.

But the heart of the essay is not the contrast. It’s the Catholic tradition. The Catholic understanding of peace is not the world’s understanding. Peace, as the Catechism teaches, is not merely the absence of war. It is “the tranquility of order”, the work of justice and the effect of charity. When Pope Leo speaks, he speaks from within that tradition, not from within any party or faction. To read him otherwise is to misread him.

Whether the Iran war meets the criteria of the Church’s just war doctrine is a genuinely difficult question. Answering it requires expertise in economics, military science, and diplomacy, not just philosophy and theology. I don’t pretend to settle it. But I do argue that every one of us, as stewards of the common good, has a duty to engage in that discernment rather than collapse the question into partisan reflex.

The essay closes with a line I mean sincerely: I hope and pray the president didn’t really mean what he said, and I thank God we have a pope who is unafraid to bear witness to Jesus, King of Peace.

Read the full essay at The Dispatch: Pope Leo’s Case Against the Iran War Is Not Political

In July 1899 Swami came to England again with Sister Nivedita, where Sister Christine and Mrs. Funke met him. From there he came to America and he came to us at Ridgely Manor in September of that year where we gave him his own cottage with two of his monks, Turiyananda and Abhedananda. Sister Nivedita was also there, and Mrs. Ole Bull. It was quite a community of people who loved and honoured the Swami, He used to call my Sister, Mrs. Leggett. “Mother”, and always sat beside her at table. He particularly liked chocolate ice cream, because, “I too am chocolate and I like it,” he would say. One day we were having strawberries, and someone said to him. “Swami, do you like strawberries?” He answered, “I never tasted them.” “You never tasted them, why you eat them every day!” He said, “You have cream on them — pebbles with cream would be good.”

In the evening, sitting around the great fire in the hall of Ridgely Manor, he would talk, and once after he came out with some of his thoughts a lady said. “Swami, I don’t agree with you there.” “No? Then it is not for you,” he answered. Someone else said. “O, but that is where I find you true.” “Ah, then it was for you.” he said showing that utter respect for the other man’s views. One evening he was so eloquent, about a dozen people listening, his voice becoming so soft and seemingly far away; when the evening was over, we all separated without even saying goodnight to each other. Such a holy quality pervaded. My sister, Mrs. Leggett, had occasion to go to one of the rooms afterward. There she found one of the guests, an agnostic, weeping. “What do you mean?” my sister asked, and the lady said, “The man has given me eternal life. I never wish to hear him again.”

-Josephine MacLeod, Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, 3rd Edition (Advaita Ashrama, 1983)

This is why I was glad to sit down with Daniel Darling on Acton Line to discuss his new book, In Defense of Christian Patriotism, published by Broadside Books. Darling is the director of the Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and a fellow at the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. He has thought carefully about what faithful public engagement looks like, and this book is the fruit of that thinking.

Our conversation explored why patriotism needs defending in the first place. Not because love of country is self-evidently good, idolatries of the nation have done incalculable harm, but because the Christian tradition offers resources for a patriotism that is genuinely different from its counterfeits. A patriotism grounded not in blood and soil but in gratitude, responsibility, and a vision of the common good that transcends partisan allegiance.

What I found most compelling in our discussion was Darling’s argument that Christian patriotism, rightly understood, doesn’t threaten pluralistic America but can actually reinvigorate it. This is a crucial distinction. The question is not whether Christians should care about their country, of course they should, but how they should care, and toward what ends.

Lord Acton wrestled with these very questions in his 1862 essay “Nationality,” where he argued that the health of a state depends not on national homogeneity but on the coexistence of distinct communities under a shared commitment to liberty. Christianity, Acton believed, rejoices at the mixture of peoples precisely because its truths are universal. A Christian patriotism worthy of the name must reckon with that universality even as it affirms the particular loves and obligations that bind us to the places we call home.

Darling’s book is a welcome contribution to that reckoning.

Watch the episode on YouTube.

Pick up In Defense of Christian Patriotism from Daniel Darling.

I am not surprised.

In the fall of 2022, I wrote an essay for Acton’s Religion & Liberty called “The Metaverse Does Not Exist.” The title was meant literally. The metaverse did not exist. It was a fiction built upon science fiction. The term was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, its predecessor “cyberspace” by William Gibson a decade earlier. What interested me was not the technology itself, which was obviously underwhelming, but the desire behind it. What did the dreamers of Silicon Valley actually want? What were they promising? And what might the science fiction writers from whom they borrowed their vocabulary tell us about the nature of those promises?

The essay traced the metaverse concept through the works of Philip K. Dick, who spent his entire career asking two questions: What is reality? and What constitutes the authentic human being? Dick understood, in a way our technological visionaries never quite did, the peril of manufactured realities. He was himself a man of tenuous grip on the real—plagued by mental illness, substance abuse, and highly idiosyncratic mystical experiences—but that made his warnings more credible, not less. He knew what it meant to be a victim of one’s own fictions.

Dick’s 1965 novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch offered what I still think is the most vivid literary anticipation of the metaverse. Colonists on hostile alien worlds escape their miserable existence through a shared hallucinogenic experience, miniature doll-house layouts animated by a drug called Can-D, that begins as escapism, becomes a religion, and leaves the real world in ruins. The only colonists who resist are the Neo-Christians, who recognize the idolatry for what it is. Many of them give in to temptation anyway.

Zuckerberg promised that the metaverse would make you “really going to feel like you’re there with other people.” Dick showed us what happens when simulated community displaces the real thing: hovels fall into disrepair, terraforming is abandoned, and the shared hallucination devours everything.

What strikes me now, rereading the essay in light of last week’s news, is how perfectly the story arc of Meta’s metaverse project maps onto the pattern I described. The dangerous dreamers of the day dreamed their dream with open eyes. They invested staggering sums of financial, human, and reputational capital. They promised liberation from the constraints of creation, “a virtual plane parallel to the physical world,” in the words of metaverse evangelist Matthew Ball, “with no cap to what we can do.” And they discovered, as Dick’s characters always discover, that you can’t build a universe that doesn’t fall apart two days later.

The metaverse was always, at its deepest level, an idol. Not because virtual reality is inherently wicked, it isn’t, but because the faith placed in it to deliver transcendence, community, and meaning was a faith misplaced, built on the shifting sand of the whims and capacities of those who fashioned it. As I wrote then: “Looking to the metaverse for love, community, and solidarity outside our service to neighbors in the real world violates our duty to both them and their Creator.”

Meta’s pivot to AI raises its own set of questions. But those are for another day. For now, it’s worth pausing to note that the metaverse still does not exist—and the $80 billion dream that was supposed to make it real has been quietly put on life support.

The essay is available in full at Religion & Liberty: “The Metaverse Does Not Exist.”

The review, authored by Stephanie Emma Brown of the University of Hull, surveys the most significant scholarship in late medieval economic and social history published in 2024. Out of the many articles and studies considered, Patriarca’s “A Franciscan monetary theory? Alexander Bonini and the forms of money at the end of the middle ages” is singled out as a key contribution to the field’s “rich global scope.” Brown places Patriarca’s work alongside studies of monetization in medieval Japan and Bulgaria, noting that together these contributions reveal how monetization across the medieval world was “not merely a technical or economic process but a deeply cultural one.”

Here is part of what Brown writes about Patriarca’s contribution:

Patriarca’s analysis of Franciscan monetary thought in late mediaeval Western Europe introduces a third dimension: the intellectual and theological engagement with money itself. Patriarca examines how Alexander Bonini, a Franciscan thinker, challenged Aristotelian notions of the sterility of money by recognizing the social utility of money-changers and the circulation of currency. Bonini’s treatise De Usuris not only defended the costs associated with financial mediation but also laid the groundwork for modern monetary doctrines. His pragmatic approach, which was rooted in the Franciscan ethos of voluntary poverty, extended to theories of contracts, price formation, and the composition of currencies, often supported by sophisticated mathematical and statistical reasoning. Figures such as Nicole Oresme, writing in the fourteenth century, echoed and refined these debates in works such as De Moneta, where he distinguished between banking, usury, and coinage debasement, each with its own moral and economic implications. The Franciscan legacy, as Patriarca shows, also manifested institutionally through the Montes Pietatis, charitable pawnbrokers that offered microcredit to the emerging urban classes, alleviating the burden of interest and expanding access to capital. These institutions, rooted in Central Italy, eventually spread across Europe and into the ‘Spanish’ Americas, underscoring the transregional impact of Franciscan economic thought.

This is a remarkable acknowledgment. The Economic History Review is one of the premier journals in the discipline, and its annual literature reviews set the terms of scholarly conversation. To be featured so prominently, and in a passage that highlights the originality, breadth, and lasting institutional significance of the Franciscan economic tradition, is a testament to the quality and importance of Patriarca’s research.

The article Brown highlights is included in Patriarca’s new book, At the Frontiers of Scholasticism: Scientific Method, Innovation, and Economic Reasoning, published by the Acton Institute. As I wrote a few weeks ago, the book dismantles the myth that the medieval world was an intellectual backwater by showing how Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits laid the foundations for the scientific method, modern mathematics, and economic reasoning—long before the Enlightenment claimed credit.

The chapter on Franciscan monetary theory is one of the book’s most fascinating. What Brown’s review confirms is that this isn’t just an interesting historical curiosity. It’s serious, field-shaping scholarship that is changing how economic historians understand the medieval origins of modern finance. From Alexander Bonini’s defense of money-changers to the Montes Pietatis, charitable pawnbrokers that spread from Central Italy across Europe and into the Americas, the Franciscan economic legacy turns out to be far more sophisticated and consequential than most people realize.

The book is now available in ebook and paperback: At the Frontiers of Scholasticism

Jimmy Lai was sentenced to 20 years in prison last month. Now you can be arrested for selling a book about him. First they jailed the newspaper publisher. Then they came for the booksellers.

Mark Clifford, who is based in New York, responded to reporters by observing that if the reports were true, it was a sad and ironic commentary, that selling a book about a man imprisoned for promoting free expression would itself be treated as sedition.

He’s right. And that irony should sharpen our attention, not dull it.

Last year, I had the privilege of speaking with Mark on Acton Line about his book and about the remarkable life he chronicles. Hong Kong has scores of billionaires, but only one of them dared to stand up to China while the city’s freedoms were being systematically dismantled. What in Jimmy Lai’s extraordinary life explains such courage?

The answer begins, as so many great stories do, with nothing. Lai arrived in Hong Kong as a penniless boy who had fled mainland China. He built a garment empire, then a media empire, most notably Apple Daily, the scrappy pro-democracy tabloid that became a thorn in Beijing’s side for decades. He could have enjoyed his fortune in comfortable silence. Instead, he used it to speak.

Lai’s story is not merely political. It is deeply personal and, ultimately, spiritual. His conversion to Catholicism gave shape and depth to convictions that were already forming: that human dignity demands freedom, and that freedom demands witnesses willing to suffer for it. As Mark and I discussed, Lai understood that what was happening in Hong Kong was not just a local affair. It was a test case for whether authoritarianism could quietly extinguish liberty in one of the world’s most visible cities.

The Chinese Communist Party’s answer has been emphatic. The national security law imposed in 2020, followed by the even broader “Article 23” legislation in 2024, has transformed Hong Kong’s legal landscape. Lai’s 20-year sentence in February was the heaviest penalty yet under these laws. And now the net tightens further, not just around dissidents and journalists, but around anyone who would so much as hand a customer a book about one.

I’d encourage you to listen to our full conversation. It was recorded before Lai’s sentencing, before this week’s bookshop arrests, and yet everything Mark said about the trajectory of Hong Kong has proved painfully prescient.

Listen to the episode →

You can also find Mark Clifford’s work at markclifford.org and learn more about the advocacy effort through the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation.

The Troublemaker is still available where books can be sold freely.

Is it fair to call C.S. Lewis a gender theorist? Josh makes a compelling case that it is although what Lewis means by gender and what contemporary gender ideology means by it are very different things. Lewis’s vision is rooted in an older tradition, one that draws on medieval cosmology, Christian theology, and the moral imagination rather than the categories of modern social constructionism.

What I found most rewarding about this conversation is how it moves across the whole range of Lewis’s work. We talk about the Narnia chronicles, the Space Trilogy, Till We Have Faces, The Four Loves, The Abolition of Man, and even Lewis’s lesser-known literary scholarship on Spenser. Gender was woven into the fabric of Lewis’s imaginative and philosophical vision of reality.

We also get into what Lewis’s critics consistently get wrong, and whether or not Lewis had a conception of the divine feminine.

Give it a listen or a watch:

📺 Watch on YouTube

🎙️ Show notes and links at Acton.org

📖 Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve from the Davenant Institute

If you enjoy the conversation, leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts—it helps more people find the show.

Have you not heard his silent steps? He comes, comes, ever comes.

Every moment and every age, every day and every night he comes, comes, ever comes.

Many a song have I sung in many a mood of mind, but all their notes have always proclaimed, “He comes, comes, ever comes.”

In the fragrant days of sunny April through the forest path he comes, comes, ever comes.

In the rainy gloom of July nights on the thundering chariot of clouds he comes, comes, ever comes.

In sorrow after sorrow it is his steps that press upon my heart, and it is the golden touch of his feet that makes my joy to shine.

- Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali (Macmillan Company, 1914), 36-37.

What came out of that experience was “What I Saw at the National Conservatism Conference,” published in the Winter/Spring 2022 issue of Religion & Liberty. It was my first major feature essay, and it became the beginning of something I didn’t anticipate: a years-long project of chronicling the development of the National Conservatism movement from the inside.

I’ve since written multiple essays tracing the movement’s evolution from an amorphous outsider insurgency to a force that now claims to simply be the conservative movement. Looking back, one of the things that strikes me most about that first NatCon experience is just how different the movement’s relationship with Donald Trump was compared to today.

At NatCon 2, the conference was circumspect about Trump. His image appeared on a vendor table banner alongside Ron DeSantis, but on the stage and in the intellectual life of the conference, the movement was trying to be something distinct. The NatCons billed themselves as “against the dead consensus”, the old fusionism of Buckley and Reagan, and were positioning themselves as a movement of ideas, not a personality cult. Yoram Hazony, the movement’s intellectual architect, even floated the possibility of alliances with “anti-Marxist liberals.” Many of the speakers, I noticed, sounded in substance like the very fusionists they claimed to have superseded.

The conference room was often half-empty. Most of the attendees I met were students or think tank staffers. There was an earnestness to it, a sense of a movement still figuring itself out, still undertheorized and untested as a political coalition. Trump was in the air, but not quite in the room.

Compare that to what came after.

By NatCon 3 in 2022, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was a keynote speaker, and Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, claimed the movement as “ours.” The outsiders had become insiders. By NatCon 4 in Washington, D.C., the tone had shifted from triumphant to domineering. The FreedomConservatism statement of principles, an attempt to reassert the old fusionist synthesis, was dismissed from the podium as “totally insipid and anodyne.” Rachel Bovard captured the new mood when she declared that National Conservatism simply “is the conservative movement.”

And then there’s J.D. Vance, who has been the closing speaker at two NatCon conferences and is now Vice President of the United States. The circumspection about Trump that I observed in Orlando? It has been replaced by something closer to full alignment.

I didn’t set out to become a chronicler of this movement. I went to a conference, tried to make sense of what I saw, and wrote it up with some humor and, I hope, some honesty. But the story kept developing, and I kept writing. The journey from that half-empty conference room beside the open fire pit at the Orlando Hilton to the corridors of American power is one of the more remarkable trajectories in recent political history.

If you want to see where it all started, you can read the original essay here:

“What I Saw at the National Conservatism Conference” — Religion & Liberty, Winter/Spring 2022

Jordan Ballor, executive director of First Liberty’s Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy, whose feature essay “The Upside-Down Kingdom of Jesus of Nazareth” appears in the latest issue of Religion & Liberty. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Jordan on this week’s episode of Acton Line to dig into the essay and the deeper theological vision behind it.

Jordan’s argument begins where you might not expect, with Pontius Pilate. When Pilate affixed that sign to the cross reading Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudæorum (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews), he unwittingly provided a concise summary of Jesus’s true identity. His proper name, his home region, and his title are all captured by a Roman governor who had no idea what he was really writing.

From there, Jordan traces the radical implications of Christ’s kingship through Scripture, the church fathers, Abraham Kuyper, C.S. Lewis, and a haunting medieval English poem called “Pearl.”

The core insight is this: Christ’s kingdom operates on a completely different logic than the kingdoms of this world. Jesus told James and John, who wanted seats of honor at his right and left hand, that in his kingdom whoever would be great must be a servant, and whoever would be first must be slave of all. That’s not how worldly power works. Worldly power runs top-down: the stronger rule over the weaker. Christ inverts the whole thing.

Jordan frames this through two images Jesus himself used. The kingdom is like a pearl of great price, it causes us to revalue everything else in our lives in light of its surpassing worth. Fame and greatness in God’s kingdom and fame and greatness on earth, as Lewis’s guide says in The Great Divorce, are two quite different things. And the kingdom is like a leaven working from the inside out, transforming the hearts of God’s people and through them acting as an agent of renewal in the wider world.

What I find especially compelling about Jordan’s essay is that it refuses to let us settle for either of two common errors. We can’t pursue a kingdom without a king, and throw ourselves into social and political projects while forgetting who Christ actually is, but neither can we claim a king without a kingdom and retreat into a purely spiritual piety that has nothing to say about the world God made and loves. Christ’s kingdom is not of this world, but it exists for this world—for its redemption, restoration, and consummation.

This has profound implications for how Christians think about vocation, stewardship, and public life. If Christ is our king, then we are his stewards, each set in charge of some corner of his creation. As Jordan puts it, Christ takes us in our worldly situations, our families, our careers, our communities, and claims us for his own. He reorients our loyalties, and those newly ordered loyalties free us to serve God and neighbor through our various callings.

Or, as Lewis wrote: “Aim at heaven, and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”

This conversation is one of those episodes where I came away thinking differently about something I thought I already understood. If you engage with the “Christ is King” discourse online (please don’t!), or if you’ve ever wondered what it would actually look like to take that claim seriously, I’d encourage you to give this one a listen.

Watch or listen to the full episode of Acton Line.

Read Jordan’s full essay, “The Upside-Down Kingdom of Jesus of Nazareth,” in Religion & Liberty.

And if you enjoy Acton Line, the best thing you can do is leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and share this episode with someone who might appreciate it. You can also reach us anytime at podcast@acton.org.

It’s a tidy story. It’s also wrong.

Giovanni Patriarca’s new book, At the Frontiers of Scholasticism: Scientific Method, Innovation, and Economic Reasoning, published by the Acton Institute, dismantles this myth with meticulous scholarship and genuine intellectual excitement. Across five richly researched essays, Patriarca shows that the foundations of the scientific method, modern mathematics, and economic reasoning were laid not in the secular Enlightenment but in the medieval universities, monasteries, and commercial centers of Europe by Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits whose intellectual inquiry was inseparable from their vocations as men of faith.

The story begins in the thirteenth century, when the translation and dissemination of Greek, Arabic, and Jewish texts created the conditions for an unprecedented cultural flourishing. At Oxford, Robert Grosseteste was developing the controlled experiment and applying mathematics to the study of natural phenomena. His student Roger Bacon was championing the role of observation and experience. At Paris and across Europe, scholastic thinkers were engaging in disputatio (structured debate aimed not at winning arguments with elegant rhetoric but at arriving at truth).

Far from the rigid, ossified system of its popular caricature, scholasticism was a living tradition, dynamic and fertile. Patriarca traces its frontiers in every sense of the word. These frontiers were geographical spanning the trade routes from Normandy to the Italian Apennines, from the Mediterranean to the British Isles. They were intellectual pushing into uncharted territory opened up by new forms of commerce, banking, and international trade. And they were interreligious as Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers exchanged ideas in mathematics and philosophy.

The economic dimension of the book is especially compelling. The roots of modern economic thought, Patriarca argues, are to be found not in Adam Smith or the Scottish Enlightenment but in the scholastic search for truth. The Hispanic Scholastics, the School of Salamanca, explored questions of price, value, and entrepreneurial innovation while applying moral reasoning to questions about trade, private property, and monetary policy. Patriarca furthers the Acton Institute’s important, longstanding project of studying, translating, and publishing the works of these pioneering thinkers.

One of the book’s most fascinating chapters examines Franciscan monetary theory. Another explores the Norman legal and commercial paradigm that helped give rise to the remarkable banking system of medieval Europe. Throughout, Patriarca conveys how these scholars sought to grasp the totality of truth in all its dimensions employing theology and philosophy as well as mathematics and the scientific method. For the scholastics, scientific and religious truth were not rivals but companions.

As John Pinheiro writes in his foreword, the “frontiers of scholasticism” were as geographical as they were intellectual: “Scholastic thinkers applied reason to the natural world because, as God’s creation, they knew it to be intelligible and bound by discoverable laws. Likewise, they applied this same rigor, in a synthesis of faith and reason, to human action.”

At a time when debates about science, economics, faith, and progress are as charged as ever, At the Frontiers of Scholasticism is a welcome reminder that the relationship between these domains has a richer and more fruitful history than we are usually told.

This was such a fun project to work on!

The book is already the #1 New Release in Medieval Western Philosophy on Amazon.

The ebook is available for preorder now: At the Frontiers of Scholasticism on Amazon

The paperback edition will be published and available on March 25, 2026.

Our ordinary conception of God is that He is superhuman, infinite, omnipresent, omniscient, and the like. In this general conception there are many variations. Some call God personal, some see Him as impersonal. The point emphasized in this book is that whatever conception we have of God, if it does not influence our daily conduct, if everyday life does not find an inspiration from it, and if it is not found universally necessary, then that conception is useless.

If God is not conceived in such a way that we cannot do without Him in the satisfaction of a want, in our dealings with people, in earning money, in reading a book, in passing an examination, in the doing of the most trifling or the highest duties, then it is plain that we have not felt any connection between God and life.

God may be infinite, omnipresent, omniscient, personal, and merciful, but these conceptions are not sufficiently compelling to make us try to know Him. We may as well do without Him. He may be infinite, omnipresent, and so forth, but we have no immediate and practical use for those conceptions in our busy, rushing lives.

We fall back on those conceptions only when we seek to justify, in philosophical and poetical writings, in art or in idealistic talks, the finite craving for something beyond; when we, with all our vaunted knowledge, are at a loss to explain some of the most common phenomena of the universe; or when we get stranded in the vicissitudes of the world. “We pray to the Ever-Merciful when we get stuck,” as the Eastern maxim has it. Otherwise, we seem to get along all right in our workaday world without Him.

These stereotyped conceptions appear to be the safety valves of our pent-up human thought. They explain Him, but do not make us seek Him. They lack motive power. We are not necessarily seeking God when we call Him infinite, omnipresent, all-merciful and omniscient. These conceptions satisfy the intellect, but do not soothe the soul. If respected and cherished in our hearts, they may broaden us to a certain extent—may make us moral and resigned toward Him. But they do not make God our own—they are not intimate enough. They place Him aloof from everyday concerns of the world.

These conceptions savor of outlandishness when we are on the street, in a factory, behind a counter, or in an office. Not because we are really dead to God and religion, but because we lack a proper conception of them—a conception that can be interwoven with the fabric of daily life. What we conceive of God should be of daily, nay hourly, guidance to us. The very conception of God should stir us to seek Him in the midst of our daily lives. This is what we mean by a pragmatic and compelling conception of God. We should take religion and God out of the sphere of belief into that of daily life.

-Paramahansa Yogananda, The Science of Religion (Self-Realization Fellowship, 2020)

Everyone knows the line. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It may be the most quoted sentence in the history of political thought. But Acton’s life and writings go immeasurably deeper than any single maxim, and it was Himmelfarb who first made that depth accessible to a modern audience.

A Biographer Equal to Her Subject

Himmelfarb began her study of Acton as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s, publishing it as her first book in 1952. The timing matters. She was writing in the immediate aftermath of World War II, with the horrors of Nazism and the emerging threat of Soviet totalitarianism fresh in the world’s memory. In that context, she recognized something that Acton’s own contemporaries had largely missed: his moral realism was not the eccentricity of a Victorian aristocrat but a prophetic warning to the modern world.

As she put it with characteristic precision, Acton “is of this age more than of his.” The naive optimism and crude materialism that dominated so much of the nineteenth century had been shattered. And there stood Acton, vindicated, a thinker who had never been taken in by the comfortable illusions of progress, and who could therefore speak with authority when history ran amok.

Too Liberal for the Catholics, Too Catholic for the Liberals

What makes Himmelfarb’s biography so enduring is her refusal to reduce Acton to a tidy ideological category. He was, as she memorably described him, “too Liberal for the Catholics and too Catholic for the Liberals.” A devout Catholic who waged a fierce campaign against papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council. A passionate champion of political liberty who insisted that freedom without moral foundations was no freedom at all. A prolific essayist and editor who envisioned a magisterial history of liberty but never wrote a single book.

These paradoxes would tempt a lesser biographer into oversimplification. Himmelfarb resisted. By hewing carefully to Acton’s own written work (his essays, lectures, reviews, and voluminous correspondence) she produced a portrait that balances criticism with genuine sympathy toward a complicated and often anguished mind.

Her central insight was that Acton’s commitment to liberty was inseparable from his Catholic faith. The liberals of his day wanted political freedom at the expense of the Church, and traditional Catholics wanted the Church at the expense of political freedom. Acton understood what neither camp could see: that in a pluralistic society, the Church’s freedom could only be guaranteed by a genuinely free political order, and that a free political order required the moral grounding that religion provided. Liberty and conscience were not rivals. They were partners.

A Life Worthy of the Subject

Himmelfarb herself was a remarkable figure. Born in 1922 to Russian Jewish immigrants in a one-bedroom apartment in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, she rose to become one of the foremost historians of Victorian intellectual life. At Brooklyn College she amassed enough credits to have majored in history, economics, and philosophy simultaneously, while commuting at night to the Jewish Theological Seminary for a parallel degree. At a Trotskyite gathering, she met a young man named Irving Kristol. They would be married for sixty-seven years.

Her body of work after the Acton biography was extraordinary: Landmark studies of Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot, alongside sweeping social histories of Victorian Britain that explored how an entire culture wrestled with questions of poverty, compassion, and moral responsibility. She brought a Victorian sensibility to contemporary American debates, insisting that questions of virtue and character were not quaint relics but urgent necessities.

When she passed in December 2019 at the age of ninety-seven, it was the end of a truly singular career. She was, as I wrote at the time, “one of those rare thinkers and writers who were the total package: prolific, scholarly, and a virtuoso of the writing craft itself.”

Bringing the Book Back

When Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics went out of print, I had the privilege of working to bring it back in a new typesetting from the Acton Institute. It was my first major book project, my introduction to the intricacies of editing and publishing, and an honor I still feel keenly. The book remains, in my view, unmatched as a concise, lively, and insightful account of Lord Acton’s life and thought. It is simultaneously the best introduction to Acton and the key to understanding Himmelfarb’s entire intellectual project.

When I was preparing my own first edited volume, Lord Acton: Historical and Moral Essays, Himmelfarb was the first person I thought of for an endorsement. Her biography had been an inspiration for the project from the beginning. She graciously offered words that I keep by my desk to this day: “A new volume of essays by Lord Acton is more welcome than ever. In the present state of cultural and social disarray, his reflections on history and modernity are as perceptive and prescient today as they were over a century ago.”

Why This Book, Why Now

We live in a moment that would have been grimly familiar to Acton. Ideological certainties harden into dogmas. Political power is treated as an end in itself rather than a trust to be exercised with restraint. Moral questions are dismissed as distractions from the real business of politics, or worse, weaponized for partisan advantage. The relationship between faith and public life remains as fraught as it was in Acton’s battles with Rome.

Acton saw all of this coming. Himmelfarb saw that he had seen it. And she gave us a book that makes his vision available to anyone willing to sit with a difficult, demanding, and ultimately hopeful thinker.

For those interested in exploring Himmelfarb’s life and legacy further, I highly recommend Nicole Penn’s excellent essay “The Historian’s Craft” in National Affairs, as well as our conversation about it on the Acton Line podcast. Penn explores how Himmelfarb’s encounter with Acton shaped her entire career, her conviction that history is a craft demanding both rigor and moral imagination, and her belief that the historian’s vocation carries with it a responsibility not merely to record the past but to illuminate the present.

Pick up Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics. It is the best book on one of history’s greatest defenders of liberty and conscience, written by one of the twentieth century’s finest historians. In the present state of things, we need both of them more than ever.

It matters a great deal, as I learned in this week’s conversation with John Pinheiro, director of research at the Acton Institute.

John recently reviewed Robert C. Hockett’s A Republic of Producers for Law & Liberty. Hockett, a legal theorist at Cornell, attempts something ambitious: fusing Hamilton’s financial vision with Jefferson’s agrarian ideals into a unified economic program for today. The title of John’s review — “A Failure of Vision” — gives you some idea of how he thinks that project turned out.

What makes this conversation worth your time isn’t just the early Republic history, though there’s plenty of that. It’s the deeper methodological question lurking underneath: What happens when non-historians try to do history?

Legal theorists, policy writers, and political commentators regularly raid the founding era for ammunition. They want Hamilton or Jefferson on their side. But as John argues, cherry-picking from the past to justify present-day policy prescriptions is a fundamentally different enterprise from understanding the past on its own terms — and the results are often distorted in ways that matter.

We also got into Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life and its 20th-century legacy, the enduring wisdom of Federalist No. 51, and even Nietzsche’s surprisingly relevant essay on the uses and abuses of history.

If you care about the American founding, the misuse of history in political arguments, or just want a wide-ranging intellectual conversation, give this one a listen.

Watch the full episode: YouTube

Read John’s review: “A Failure of Vision” at Law & Liberty

A few years ago, I drove to the home of two retired Catholic scholars, James and Mary Holland, to pick up a book donation for the Acton Institute, where I work as librarian. We spent the afternoon packing shelves of British history—many volumes featuring Lord Acton’s closest allies and fiercest adversaries, including a few figures who could claim to have been both.

Then Mary reminded James not to forget the basement.

In the basement was a complete bound set of The Rambler—the Catholic magazine so intimately associated with Lord Acton—annotated in the Hollands’ own hand. Anonymous Victorian bylines, so often absent in periodicals of the era, had been carefully penciled into the margins. I loaded The Rambler last, and I loaded it best. It rode in the passenger seat, shotgun, all the way back to Grand Rapids.

That night at the hotel, I couldn’t sleep. I went out to the truck, retrieved the box, and leafed through a volume. It didn’t feel right to leave them out in the cold.

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From a 21st-century vantage point, this might seem eccentric. Why would a librarian give pride of place to a *magazine* over so many significant and rare books?

The answer is bound up in a question I explore in an old essay for Religion & Liberty: **Was there a time when a mere magazine could shake up institutions and sway generations?** And if so, have we sacrificed that kind of scholarship for persiflage and influence for “likes”?

Lord Acton thought magazines were the most powerful intellectual medium of his age. The best writers and statesmen of the world, who formerly would have written a book or a pamphlet, were instead contributing articles to leading reviews and magazines that would be read across Europe before the month was out.

So Acton took the editor’s chair at *The Rambler* in 1859. His mission was ambitious: to unite a hearty acceptance of Catholic dogma with free inquiry and discussion on every question the Church left open to debate. He wanted to give voice to a newly emancipated English Catholicism—the first generation since the Reformation to live their adult lives with full rights as citizens and ordinary church governance as Catholics.

The resistance he met was extraordinary. One contributor, Richard Simpson, was denied absolution after confession because of his work for the magazine. When John Henry Newman briefly assumed editorship to appease critics, his own article was reported to Rome. Ecclesiastical censure was a constant shadow.

Acton was eventually pushed into a corner. Rather than submit to a clerical board of censors or water down the magazine’s commitment to truth, he shut it down—and then immediately launched a successor, Home and Foreign Review, which inherited all the old enemies. Its very first issue insisted on referring to Pope Paul III’s “son” rather than the polite euphemism of “nephew.” It lasted two years.

His closing editorial remains one of the great statements on intellectual conscience. He would not abandon principles sincerely held. He would not attack legitimate authority. He chose both obedience and freedom by sacrificing the magazine itself.

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In the essay, I trace what I call “the Rambler effect” forward into 20th-century America. Magazines like Christian Century, Commonweal, and Christianity Today didn’t just reflect the mainline, Catholic, and evangelical communities—they helped constitute them. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus attempted a brilliant ecumenical synthesis with First Things in 1990, coordinating writers from across traditions until, inevitably, the tensions boiled over too.

Each of these magazines placed a bet that the periodical format—regular, curated, edited with a coherent vision—could shape the intellectual life of entire communities. And each of them, to varying degrees, won that bet.

So what about now? Information and influence today ride on algorithmic tides with no moon’s constancy. Link rot steadily erases the digital record. The editorial vision at most outlets has narrowed even as the platforms have multiplied.

I think there’s still a case for the magazine—for writing packaged in regular intervals, shaped by editorial judgment, and ambitious enough to reach beyond our sects and partisan identities. Lord Acton’s moral vision has never been more resonant. The ideological evils he identified—radical egalitarianism, socialism, nationalism—cannot be confronted by those of little faith or none at all.

The morning after I picked up The Rambler, I woke up to revision notes from my own editor on a magazine article I’d sent before leaving Grand Rapids. I made my edits, closed the laptop, and looked across the room at the box containing the bound volumes.

“There’s articles left in you yet.”

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**Read the full essay in Religion & Liberty*, Volume 34, Number 2:**

The Rambler and the Transformative Power of Magazines