On the newest episode of Acton Line, I sat down with two colleagues who have spent the better part of a decade quibbling with that tidiness: John Pinheiro, the Acton Institute’s Director of Research, and Dylan Pahman, Research Fellow and founder of the St. Nicholas Cabasilas Institute. Their new book, The Christian Roots of American Liberty: A Reader (Acton Institute, 2026), refuses the binary entirely and does so not by mere argument but careful presentation of evidence.

A Sourcebook, Not a Polemic

What distinguishes the volume is its method. Pinheiro and Pahman are not interested in asserting that American liberty is Christian; they are interested in showing it, document by document. Ideas and texts ancient, medieval, and early modern, formed the principles the founders would later take for granted. The editors mostly step aside and let the witnesses speak.

It is a quieter approach and a more durable one. Polemics persuade in the moment; sources outlast the controversies that occasioned them.

The Principles and Their Prehistory

The book is organized around the load-bearing commitments of the American settlement: natural rights and the rule of law, religious liberty, private property, limited government, and representation and consent. None of these was conjured whole cloth in Philadelphia. Each arrived with a prehistory, older than 1776, older even than Locke, stretching back through the schoolmen and the Church Fathers.

There is no shortage of readers that gather the early-modern voices we already know. What Pahman and Pinheiro add is patristic and medieval depth. Irenaeus of Lyons on freedom and judgment sits a few pages from the familiar founders; the conviction that taxes ought not be levied without consent turns out to have a long Christian pedigree. The roots, it emerges, run deeper than our usual histories trouble to dig.

Render Unto Caesar

Lord Acton, as ever, saw the heart of it. He held that when Christ said render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s, those words—spoken days before His death—gave to the civil power “a sacredness it had never enjoyed, and bounds it had never acknowledged.” The limit on Caesar was a was written into nature and made the charge of the Church before it was a political doctrine. Liberty, in other words, has a longer genealogy than its modern champions are inclined to admit, and a more theological one than its modern critics find comfortable.

That genealogy is precisely what Pinheiro and Pahman have set out to recover. To name the Christian roots of American liberty is not to baptize the state, as the integralists would have it, nor to surrender the founding to secular self-congratulation. It is to understand what we have actually inherited—and therefore what is ours to conserve, or to squander.

A Book for the Semiquincentennial

The timing is not accidental. As the republic approaches its 250th anniversary, Americans of every persuasion will be asked what, exactly, they are celebrating. The Christian Roots of American Liberty is an argument, made in the words of others, that the answer reaches back much further than the fireworks suggest and that the foundation is older, and stranger, and more enduring than either party to our current quarrel tends to allow.

Which returns us to where we began. The question is not whether America was founded as a Christian nation. The better question, the one this book equips us to as, is how deep the roots of our liberty actually go, and whether we still know how to tend them.

Listen to the full conversation with John Pinheiro and Dylan Pahman on Acton Line here:

Modern charity, organized at scale and routed through institutions, often loses that intuition. The poor become the recipients of programs rather than the subjects of relationships. The giver, freed from the friction of encounter, can dispense generosity without ever beholding the person to whom it is given. Something is delivered. Something else is withheld.

This week on Acton Line, I sit down with Ismael Hernandez, founder and president of the Freedom & Virtue Institute and author of Not Tragically Colored: Freedom, Personhood, and the Renewal of Black America and Rethinking Charity: Restoring Dignity to Poverty Relief, to talk about what we forget when we forget the person at the heart of charity.

The Anthropological First Question

Hernandez’s argument begins where every serious account of charity must begin: with the human person. Before we ask how to help, he insists, we must ask whom we are helping. The poor are not an undifferentiated mass, nor are they a problem to be managed by appropriately credentialed administrators. They are persons bearing the imago Dei. Each had a name, a history, a vocation, and capacities yet to be discovered.

If poverty is not a disease to be cured by top-down planning but a condition experienced by persons whose dignity precedes their need, then the entire architecture of much contemporary charity, designed to deliver goods to passive recipients, is misconfigured. It addresses the symptom and ignores the soul. When we view those in need as victims or as mere objects of our good intentions, we strip them of agency in the very act of meaning to help them.

From Transaction to Encounter

The reorientation Hernandez proposes is not a matter of redesigning programs but of reimagining the moment of contact. The transactional question “How may I help you?” assumes a fixed asymmetry between helper and helped. It can be asked, and answered, without either party really seeing the other.

The question Hernandez prefers is different. “We are so glad you’re here. We need you.” It is a small reformulation that changes everything. It treats the person in need not as a recipient but as a participant. A person whose presence is wanted, whose contribution is sought, whose agency is presumed.

This is the spirit animating the Freedom & Virtue Institute’s Effective Compassion Training and Self-Reliance Clubs. It is patient relational work, unglamorous and uncountable by the metrics that please donors of a more managerial cast, but it is the work that actually restores the things poverty corrodes: confidence, capacity, connection.

Respect Before Pity

Hernandez’s own story gives the argument its edge. A former Marxist-Leninist from Puerto Rico, he came into Christian ministry in the inner cities of southwest Florida and discovered how often “compassion” hollowed itself out into condescension. Generosity unaccompanied by recognition is not virtue but its counterfeit. It flatters the giver and diminishes the receiver. It mistakes the relief of guilt for the love of neighbor.

“Stop feeling sorry for the poor,” Hernandez puts it bluntly. “What about respecting the poor a little bit?”

That inversion, respect before pity, reorders the moral universe of charitable work. It refuses the comfortable hierarchy of benefactor and beneficiary and demands the harder, more humanizing labor of treating the person across from you as someone whose dignity is not yours to bestow.

It is a conviction with deep roots in the Christian tradition, and one that resonates with Pope Leo XIV’s recent call in Dilexi Te to bring the poor “from the margins to the center” of our economic, social, and spiritual life. Almsgiving without recognition leaves the margins exactly where they are.

Watch the full conversation with Ismael Hernandez here:

On the latest episode of Acton Line, I sat down with Dave Hebert, Director of Economics & Economic Freedom and a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, and an affiliate scholar at the Acton Institute, to walk through both fronts of the war that has been the dominant economic story of the spring.

What is seen

The visible costs are easy enough to enumerate. Gas above $4 a gallon. Jet fuel sharply up. Summer travel pricier. Headline inflation rising to levels we hadn’t seen in nearly two years. Bastiat’s “what is seen” is, as ever, the most visible part of the story.

But why does a regional conflict thousands of miles away show up at a gas station in central Pennsylvania within days? Dave walks us through the mechanics: how a global commodity market prices in disruption almost instantly, how the Strait of Hormuz functions as the single most consequential chokepoint in the world economy, and why releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve does not move the needle nearly as much as the press releases suggest.

What is not seen

“What is not seen” matters just as much. Consumer spending pulled back. Supply chains rerouted at tremendous cost. Inflation expectations were unsettled. These consequences compound and shape decisions made by households, firms, and policymakers for years.

Among the costs not seen, and entirely self-inflicted, are those imposed by our own laws. Dave makes the case against one of them in particular: the Jones Act, the century-old protectionist statute requiring that goods shipped between American ports travel on American-built, American-crewed, American-flagged vessels. It is the reason that it is nearly impossible to move natural gas by ship from Texas to New England—even as New Englanders pay some of the highest energy prices in the country. The 90-day waivers periodically granted in moments of acute need paper over the policy without ever addressing it. A century on, the Jones Act remains a monument to how durable a bad idea can be when it is also profitable to a small and well-organized constituency.

The Fed’s walking contradiction

The Federal Reserve’s predicament is more a structural one. Dave describes the Fed as a “walking contradiction”: charged by Congress with both price stability and full employment, and now asked to deliver both in conditions where the two pull in opposite directions. Rising prices argue for tighter money. A softening labor market argues for the reverse. The Fed cannot have it both ways, and the more it tries, the more it confirms what classical economists have long suspected about the dual mandate itself.

This is not, in Dave’s telling, a failure of intelligence or character on the part of any particular chairman. It is a failure built into the institutional design. To ask one body to manage two variables with one instrument is to invite the kind of muddled, half-measured policy we have come to expect. Prudence, here, would begin with humility about what monetary policy can actually accomplish.

A small experiment in pedagogy

We close on a different note. Dave is in the middle of a fascinating experiment on his Substack, Economics Reality Check: turning four thousand of his old economics lecture slides into accessible articles, using Claude as a writing partner. The discussion that follows touches on the ethics of using AI as a tool rather than a shortcut and what we owe our readers and students when we adopt new instruments. It is also a small but instructive case study in what an economist’s habits of mind can offer to a question more often driven by moral panic.

Listen to the full episode here:

In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.

So Pope Leo XIV told the College of Cardinals in his first official address as pope. Many of us reading the words at the time wondered how, and how soon, the new pope would make good on them. The answer, it turns out, was: soon, and at length. His first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, has now arrived.

The choice of regnal name continues to serve as a hermeneutical key to the papacy of Leo XIV. Leo XIII looked out at the smokestacks of the late nineteenth century and gave the Church a moral analysis of the building blocks of economic analysis — land, labor, capital — to meet the first industrial revolution without surrendering to either social Darwinism or state socialism. Rerum Novarum did not solve the new things of that age, but it did equip the faithful to think with the Church about them. Our Augustinian mathematician-pope, facing not the smokestack but the server farm, now offers Magnifica Humanitas in much the same spirit.

This week on Acton Line, I sat down with my colleagues Dylan Pahman and Caleb Whitmer for a roundtable discussion on what the Holy Father is saying, and not saying, about Catholic social teaching and artificial intelligence.

A few of the threads we pulled on:

Catholicism’s developing social teaching. The encyclical lays great stress on the need for development in the Church’s social teaching with the Pope stating, “I would also like to stress how, within this tradition, the unchanging core of revealed truths regarding the human person and society is constantly intertwined with a renewed capacity for listening to historical situations and for responding to contemporary issues.” We get into historical presidents for such development and it’s necessity in the coming age of AI.

Babel vs. Jerusalem. Leo XIV reaches past the modern frame for a far older one. Are we using our new tools to build a Tower of Babel, an engineered top-down uniformity imposed by the technologically dominant, or a New Jerusalem of free cooperation, mutual aid, and shared responsibility for the common good? The biblical typology is the encyclical’s diagnostic key, but what about Pentacost?

The shift in addressee. Catholic social teaching since Rerum Novarum has, on the whole, addressed the State. Magnifica Humanitas turns much of its attention to transnational technology corporations whose decisions now shape labor markets, public discourse, and the texture of ordinary life more decisively than many governments. That shift opens fresh debates on subsidiarity, intellectual property, and the universal destination of goods.

Algorithms and just war. Among the encyclical’s most urgent passages is its warning on automated weapons. Can the venerable just-war tradition of proportionality, discrimination, legitimate authority, and last resort survive the migration of life-and-death decisions to autonomous systems? Leo XIV’s answer is unambiguous: a human person, not a program, must bear the moral weight of taking a human life.

Work, markets, and the metrics of flourishing. Magnifica Humanitas is no baptism of techno-utopianism, but neither is it a romantic rejection of the modern economy. There is a pointed jab at the “invisible hand”, and a sharper one of how GDP treated as the measure of a society’s health. Whether technological innovation, profit motives, and human dignity can be harmonized, and on what terms, is a question we kick around at some length.

Lord Acton once described the work of a faithful Catholic magazine as a fight on two fronts: against those who, for the sake of religion, fear science, and against those who, for the sake of science, despise religion. Magnifica Humanitas is, among many other things, an attempt to refuse both temptations at once. Whether it succeeds is for readers to weigh. That the attempt is worth our serious attention is not in doubt.

Listen to the full roundtable on Acton Line:

▶️ YouTube:

The choice of name was telling. It was Pope Leo XIII who, in 1891, addressed himself to the “new things” (rerum novarum) of the modern industrial economy, employing the Church’s perennial moral wisdom to engage the still-young categories of “land,” “labor,” and “capital.” With his choice of name and the words of his first address, Pope Leo XIV has placed artificial intelligence within a long arc of Catholic engagement with technological and economic change. A new encyclical is on the horizon.

It seemed a fitting moment, then, for the Acton Institute to take up these questions itself. I recently had the privilege of moderating a three-part video series, On The New Things, in which I sat down with three colleagues to consider what AI is doing, and might yet do, to our economic, historical, and anthropological self-understanding.

AI & Economics — with Dr. Stephen Barrows

The economist’s first instinct, when confronted with a new technology, is to ask what it does to prices, productivity, and the structure of work. Stephen Barrows and I take up exactly these questions. We discuss the short-term dislocations AI is likely to inflict on particular kinds of labor and the long-term potential for AI-driven productivity gains to underwrite robust global economic growth, lower the cost of living, and expand human possibility.

The honest answer is that both stories are likely to be true. The technological revolutions of the past have generally vindicated neither the Luddite nor the utopian, however well each is represented in our cultural imagination. They have, instead, demanded patience, prudence, and serious thought about what work is for in the first place.

Watch: On The New Things | AI & Economics with Dr. Stephen Barrows

AI & History — with Dr. John Pinheiro

If economics asks what is happening, history asks what has happened before. John Pinheiro joins me to situate our present moment within the longer story of modern technological change. We return to the original Industrial Revolution—its real human costs, its real human benefits, and the Church’s response in Rerum Novarum—to consider what it might mean to navigate AI without succumbing either to a reflexive Luddism or to a credulous utopianism.

The history is more interesting, and more useful, than either of those received postures. It is also more demanding. To take the past seriously is to recognize that we have been here before, in our own way, and that the resources of the tradition are not exhausted.

Watch: On The New Things | AI & History with Dr. John Pinheiro

AI & Humanity — with Michael Matheson Miller

Beneath every question of regulation, capability, and labor market dynamics lies a deeper one: what is the human person? Michael Matheson Miller and I take up the anthropological questions directly. Is artificial intelligence in fact intelligent? What is it that we are doing when we converse with a large language model, or trust an algorithm to mediate our relationships, our judgments, our attention? What becomes of human freedom, vocation, and the interior life when we are increasingly accompanied by systems designed to anticipate, predict, and shape us?

These are not entirely new questions. They were Philip K. Dick’s questions, and in their deepest form they were St. Augustine’s. But they are newly urgent.

Watch: On The New Things | AI & Humanity with Michael Matheson Miller

Whether your concerns about AI center on the labor market, the proliferation of deepfakes, or the slow erosion of authentic human encounter, this series offers a framework rooted in human dignity and the long tradition of Catholic social teaching to help orient us toward the questions that matter most.

As Pope Leo XIV has reminded us, we are not the first generation to face new things, and we will not be the last. The task is to bring to bear the resources of faith and reason on the moment in which we find ourselves—and to do so without fear.

Yet most Americans tell pollsters they are living through an affordability crisis. They are not wrong. The same quarter-century that has made televisions vanish into wallpaper has made hospital bills, college tuition, and the median home price into objects of dread. Economist Mark Perry’s now-famous “Chart of the Century” plots the divergence: prices of things produced in genuinely competitive markets fall, often dramatically; the prices of things tangled in heavy regulation and labor-intensive service delivery rise, often catastrophically. The market giveth, and the regulator taketh away.

On the latest Acton Line, I sat down with the economist Anne Bradley to discuss what to make of it all and, more pointedly, to ask whether the word “affordability,” which now dominates our political conversation, is the right word for the work ahead.

Bradley is unsentimental about the chart. The things that have grown cheaper—produced by industries open to competition, free trade, and technological substitution—are also, not coincidentally, the things in which America has been most willing to let markets work. The things that have grown more expensive like healthcare, housing, and higher education are the things in which we have been least willing. We license the providers, restrict the supply, subsidize the demand, and then act surprised when the bill arrives.

Bradley presses past the standard economist’s lament toward a question I had not heard asked quite this way: What, exactly, are we after when we say we want things to be “affordable”?

Affordability, on closer examination, is a thin and rather sad word. To make a thing affordable is to make it just barely within reach. It is a politics of zero-sum tweaks: a subsidy here, a price control there, and a tax credit to soften the edge letting people just get by. The affordability frame accepts the basic cost structure of the world as given and tries to manage its sharpest blows. It is a politics of triage.

Abundance is something else entirely.

The older and richer word in the American tradition is not affordability but abundance, and that the difference between them is not merely rhetorical. Abundance does not ask how a family might just barely scrape together rent. It asks how a society might so multiply its productive capacities that rent becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of what a working life can buy. Affordability is content with a household that survives. Abundance imagines a household that flourishes.

It is here that the conversation took its most striking turn. Bradley does not defend abundance on narrowly material grounds. She insists, rather, that abundance has a moral dimension. The point of cheaper food, cheaper clothing, cheaper communication, cheaper medicine, is not the cheapness as such but what cheapness frees us to do.

When the basic conditions of life are secured efficiently, when feeding and clothing and sheltering a family no longer consume every waking hour and every available dollar, the surplus that opens up is not merely a surplus of consumption. It is a surplus of time, of attention, of moral agency. It is the surplus from which we invest in our marriages, raise our children, befriend our neighbors, attend our churches, and give to those who have less than we do. The fruits of abundance are not the new television and the new car. The fruits of abundance are the hours and the dollars that need not be spent on mere survival.

There is a strong echo here of Fr. James V. Schall’s reflections in On Christians and Prosperity. “The great numbers of the poor,” Schall writes, “are best helped to be what they initially strive to be, namely, not poor, when everyone prospers as a result of his own initiative and work.” The development that lifts the poor is not primarily the development of charity, indispensable as charity is. It is “the development of the means of production and distribution that made it possible for the poor to enter into more productive relationship with those who had already figured out how not to be poor.”

Affordability, in its modern political register, often forgets this distinction. It treats the household budget as a fixed pie to be redivided. Abundance remembers that the pie can grow, and that the growing of it is a profoundly humane vocation.

I came away from the conversation with Bradley more convinced than I had been that words matter, and that the recent shift in our political vocabulary from the open-horizon language of abundance to the budgetary language of affordability is a change for the worse. The first is a vision; the second is an accounting exercise. The first asks what human flourishing might look like in a society that has unshackled its capacity to produce. The second asks how to make the next month’s bills.

There is a place for the accounting exercise. Families have to eat this month, not in some glorious abundant future, but a political imagination that begins and ends with affordability has given up on the aspiration that produced the cheap televisions in the first place. It has accepted the cost curve of the most regulated sectors of American life as a permanent feature of the landscape.

Bradley invites us to refuse that resignation. The “Chart of the Century” is not a chart of fate. It is a chart of choices, sector by sector, decade by decade. Where we chose competition and openness, prices fell and the world grew larger. Where we chose protection and complexity, prices rose and the world grew smaller. The conversation worth having, she suggests, is not how to subsidize our way through the second half of that chart, but how to apply to it the lessons we already learned from the first.

It is a conversation about more than economics. It is, finally, a conversation about what we believe a free people are for.

Watch the full conversation with Anne Bradley on YouTube:

That moment has passed. Not collapsed, exactly, and not been refuted into oblivion. It has quietly receded the way intellectual fashions do once their internal contradictions begin to outweigh their rhetorical force. On the latest Acton Line, I sit down with Thomas D. Howes, co-author with James M. Patterson of the forthcoming Acton Institute book Why Postliberalism Failed, to talk through how the movement rose, what it actually claimed, and why its diagnosis, however penetrating in places, led so consistently into a an anachronistic cul-de-sac.

The postliberals were right that something is wrong. That much is worth conceding at the outset. Atomization is real. The hollowing out of mediating institutions is real. A managerial liberalism increasingly contemptuous of the human goods it was once thought to safeguard is real. These are not invented grievances. But diagnosing a sickness is not the same as prescribing a cure, and here the movement faltered.

Howes traces the genealogy with care. The intellectual furniture of contemporary integralism was assembled less in the Middle Ages than in the nineteenth century, by Catholic reactionaries pushing back against the French Revolution and its aftermath. They looked to a medieval order they imagined more than they remembered: a Christendom in which the temporal and spiritual swords were neatly coordinated, the prince a faithful son of the Church, and dissent a manageable exception rather than a constitutive feature of public life. That this picture mostly never obtained. Medieval politics was a chaos of competing jurisdictions. Kings excommunicated as often as popes coronated. That messiness was paradoxically its greatest legacy! Nostalgia rarely consults the archives.

Every modern attempt to embody this vision ended badly. Confessional states have a history, and the history is not edifying. They tend to produce, roughly in this order: sectarian persecution, civil war, secularization, and finally a population so wary of religion in public life that it cannot be coaxed back without enormous patience and labor. Acton, who saw the dynamic with characteristic clarity, observed that “whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety or the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute.” Make the state’s supreme end the Catholic faith, and you do not thereby protect the faith. You enlist it in the project of absolutism, and absolutism eventually devours its instruments.

There is also, as Howes emphasizes, an economic dimension to the postliberal project that often goes underexamined by its sympathizers on the right. The movement’s critique of markets, of “neoliberalism,” of the autonomy of civil society from state direction, very often converges with progressive critiques of the same. The instrument of choice is the administrative state. The faith that bureaucrats wielding the right metaphysics will produce better outcomes than free associations of free persons is a strange one to find among self-styled traditionalists, but find it one does. It is, in the end, the old technocratic temptation in cassock and surplice.

The alternative is not a glib endorsement of liberalism in its present American form. Acton’s liberty was never mere license, and the classical liberal tradition has resources for self-criticism that its postliberal critics seldom acknowledge. Wilhelm Röpke and F. A. Hayek both distinguished a true liberalism—organic, social, deferential to traditions and institutions—from a false one that is rationalistic, atomistic, and contemptuous of inherited goods. John Paul II in Centesimus Annus distinguished an economy ordered to the human person from one that reduces persons to economic functions. The serious work is not to throw the liberal tradition over but to recover its deepest insights, rooted in the dignity of the human person, the principle of subsidiarity, and the recognition that the good must be freely chosen to be the good at all.

Constitutional democracy and religious liberty are not, as some postliberals would have it, the Trojan horses by which secular modernity smuggled in its dissolutions. They are, rightly understood, the very conditions for the kind of public life in which faith can speak honestly, contend openly, and persuade without coercion. That is a patrimony worth defending and one that postliberalism, in its haste to bury liberalism, never paused long enough to inherit.

Listen to the full conversation with Thomas Howes on Acton Line:

Preorder Why Postliberalism Failed by James Patterson and Thomas Howes from the Acton Institute here.

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.