The precise words attributed to Elizabeth are almost certainly apocryphal; one is right to be suspicious of verbatim transcripts from Tudor audience chambers. But the instinct behind them is very much alive. It animates the latest episode of Acton Line, in which I sat down with my colleague Stephen Barrows, the Acton Institute’s chief operating officer, to examine Bill Gates’s sprawling new essay on artificial intelligence, “The turbulent AI era is here.”

Gates argues that this technology is categorically unlike the disruptions that came before. Where past machines replaced muscle, AI targets cognition itself; where past tools demanded training, this one speaks our own language; what it offers, in Gates’s phrase, is “portable intelligence.” From that premise flows a striking proposal: that we designate certain “human-reserved occupations,” domains of work fenced off for people alone.

Stephen was unpersuaded that AI is so wholly new. The bulldozer displaced the ditch-digger, yes, but the spreadsheet displaced the bookkeeper and AutoCAD the draftsman: cognitive, skilled, white-collar work, gone or transformed. He pointed to the Anthropic Economic Index, which finds current AI use running somewhat more toward augmentation than outright automation: tools that make us more productive rather than simply redundant. Both of us can testify to the former from our own desks.

But the heart of our disagreement with Gates lies in that word reserved. Elizabeth reserved knitting for human hands by royal fiat, and the frame simply left. Lee carried his machines to France, where Henri IV welcomed what England had spurned. Barrows’s objection is the classical liberal’s: what is genuinely valued need not be commanded. If people prefer a human hand at the bedside of the dying, or the honest imperfections of handcrafted goods, the market will register that preference far more faithfully than any government reserve. The principle at work is subsidiarity, that decisions belong at the level closest to the human person, not decreed from above. It should govern our anxieties about children and screens, too: not the surveillance model perfected in China, but simple tools that put parents, rather than the state, in charge of their own households.

For all this, neither of us treated the essay as merely wrongheaded. The gravest danger of these technologies, Stephen suggested, is not to our paychecks but to our persons: to friendship, to family formation, to the fragile business of falling in love and raising children, already strained by falling fertility across the developed world. A tool that answers every need may quietly erode our need for one another.

The essay’s most surprising note was one we welcomed. Gates, hardly a man given to piety, calls for religious thinkers to be brought into the conversation, invoking Pope Leo XIV’s concern that technology remain at the service of the human person. To that I would add what Gates underplays: the capacity of firms themselves for moral self-government. Anthropic’s own refusal of certain military applications suggests that conscience need not always wait upon regulation.

Which returns me to William Lee. Elizabeth’s fear was not baseless; some knitters surely suffered. But the frame she barred did not vanish. It went abroad, came home, and two centuries later helped kindle an age of abundance she could not have imagined, one that lifted the descendants of those very knitters out of the poverty she had sought to spare them. She saw the seen and could not see the unseen.

We cannot un-invent the machine. The question this Acton Line conversation left me with is not whether to hold it back, but whether we will meet it with the moral resources—freely chosen virtue, the family, the church—that no royal reserve and no federal statute can supply. A curate built the first frame. Four centuries on, a technologist asks the clergy back into the room. That is a hopeful sign.

No publisher commissioned it. No industry planned it. The genre that now fills multiplexes and bestseller lists was born at a house party, among friends reading their work aloud to one another.

I thought of that villa earlier this month in a less romantic setting: the DoubleTree by Hilton near the Grand Rapids airport, where I attended BasedCon 2026, a science fiction and fantasy convention. My reflections on the weekend are now up at Religion & Liberty Daily: “Portrait of the Artist as Based.”

The essay opens with the word itself. A “con” is a swindle; a “con” is also a convention; and “based”, a coinage of the rapper Lil B, later adopted by the online right, promises authenticity, being yourself without fear of what others think. BasedCon advertises “a community that feels serious without being stiff.” Whether that promise would prove a work of con artistry in the honest or the dishonest sense was the question I carried through the hotel doors.

The right-coded signaling was there, as the name suggests. But the foreground of the con was based in the broadest and best sense: authors reading works in progress with real vulnerability, panels on the Chosen One trope and the Dark Lord problem conducted with amiable disagreement, and a formal debate between a medievalist and a scientist on whether good storytelling requires fidelity to genre conventions. I left with two books purchased on the strength of brief readings alone.

The most bracing session tackled the elephant in the publishing room: there are too many books chasing too few readers. What struck me was how little despair attended this fact. When Amazon searches yield a pile of slush, an arbitrage opportunity arises. Small, dense networks where readers actually know authors look less like a dying industry and more like an artistic scene. Success, on this view, is defined neither by fame nor fortune but by finding a dedicated audience, even one of three hundred readers.

And the writers doing this work are systems engineers and church music directors. This is not a scandal but a tradition, one the essay traces through some illustrious company. The choice facing a writer has never really been between writing full-time and not writing at all, but between what I call consumptive and creative leisure, between making something and scrolling.

I went to BasedCon expecting to observe a subculture. I came away having received, in a mysterious way, a summons to boldness in my own work, one I try to articulate in the essay’s closing turn, which I won’t spoil here.

The party at the Villa Diodati had no idea they were founding anything. They were amateurs in the oldest sense, lovers of the work, reading aloud to a room of friends on a dark summer evening. Two centuries later, the skies over publishing look dark again: the flooded market, the vanishing midlist, the pile of slush. But science fiction has been here before. It was born in exactly this weather, at exactly this scale: a few writers, a few readers, and a story worth telling. There are only too many books if books exist solely to be sold and not crafted. The villa by the lake, the DoubleTree by the airport: the light gets made indoors.

Read the whole thing at Religion & Liberty Daily.

Then, at Caesarea Philippi, something new entered history. Christ handed the keys of the kingdom not to the emperor, not to the Sanhedrin, but to a Galilean fisherman. Spiritual authority went not to Caesar, but to Peter.

That break, and what it means for religious freedom in America, is the subject of my conversation on Acton Line with William J. Haun, Senior Counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and author of the forthcoming book Not to Caesar, but to Peter: Remembering Why the Catholic Church Is a Perfect Society (Angelico Press).

Haun’s argument revives a concept most Catholics have forgotten and most Americans have never heard: the Church as a societas perfecta, a “perfect society.” He draws especially on Pope Leo XIII’s 1890 encyclical Sapientiae Christianae.

“Perfect” here is an Aristotelian term of art. It means complete: a society that possesses, in itself and by itself, all the means necessary to achieve its distinctive end of leading souls to eternal life with God. It does not mean that the Church’s clergy or laity are sinless. The Church is perfect in her constitution, not personnel. Anyone who has sat through a parish council meeting can tell the difference.

Why does this matter? Because the alternative frameworks on offer are inadequate to what the Church actually is, and dangerous to religious liberty besides.

Modern law and modern habits of mind tend to treat the Church as one voluntary association among many: a club, a nonprofit, a Rotary chapter with incense. Haun argues that this framing quietly makes religious practice a matter of state permission. If the Church is just another association, her freedoms are just another set of exemptions, granted today and revocable tomorrow.

The older teaching offers a firmer foundation. If the Church is a complete society with her own origin, her own end, and her own governance, then her independence is not a carve-out from state power but a structural boundary on it. The existence of an institution that answers to a higher authority than Caesar is itself a check on Caesar’s pretensions. This is why, as Haun notes, even non-Catholics have a stake in the argument: religious freedom grounded in the nature of the Church is far more durable than religious freedom grounded in the state’s forbearance. This argument is strikingly similar to the one advanced by Lord Acton in his 1877 lecture “The History of Freedom in Antiquity”, and it is an excellent one.

Haun is equally careful to distinguish his thesis from its counterfeit. Contemporary neo-integralists propose to direct society toward Catholic ends by capturing state power. Haun’s points out that whenever throne and altar have merged, it is the altar that gets subordinated. The regalist experiments of early modern Europe did not produce a sanctified state; they produced a domesticated Church, an instrument of governance rather than a proclaimer of the Gospel.

His counter-model is integration from without, and his exemplar is Archbishop John Hughes of New York, “Dagger John”, who met nineteenth-century nativist hostility not by seizing the levers of civil power but by building: schools, colleges, charitable institutions, legal protections. A Church confident in her own completeness enriches public life organically, from her own resources, on her own authority.

Haun closes with counsel in the same spirit: live the liturgical calendar, build the institutions, let the Church demonstrate her authority the way she always has through concrete practice.

Centuries after Caesar held it, the emperor Gratian declined the office of pontifex maximus, laying aside the old pagan priesthood. The title did not vanish. In time it settled where the keys had already gone, on the successor of the fisherman, the bishop of Rome. Caesar’s most ancient religious office now belongs to Peter’s heir.

Titles, like authority itself, eventually find their proper home. Haun’s book is a timely reminder of where that home is, and why remembering it may be the surest foundation religious liberty has.

At the birth of a technology that would annihilate distance, remake commerce, and transform war and peace, there stood a Christian asking not, “what have we built?”, but “what hath God wrought?” Wonder, gratitude, and responsibility, all in four words.

I thought of Morse while recording the latest episode of Acton Line with my friend Kevin Vallier, professor of philosophy at the University of Toledo, director of research at the Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership, and affiliate scholar at the Acton Institute. Kevin has joined me before to discuss Catholic integralism and the fusionist tradition. This time we took up a subject that will shape all the others: artificial intelligence, and the Christian case for using it well.

Kevin begins by explaining what the technology actually is. Large language models are, he explains, something like your smartphone’s autocomplete raised to an extraordinary power. Billions of interconnected parameters trained on the vast corpus of human language, predicting the next word that mimic human intelligence behaviorally and functionally, but they are not conscious and do not reason as we do.

Demystifying the technology inoculates us against both the utopians who worship it and the doomsayers who flee it. A tool understood is a tool that can be governed.

The economy ahead, Kevin argues, will be defined by what he calls “agentic capitalism”: AI systems evolving into autonomous assets that act, transact, and even replicate without direct human supervision.

The promise is real and could unlock innovation, efficiency, and scientific discovery at speeds we can scarcely imagine. But so is the peril. As AI agents mediate more of our exchanges, they risk widening the distance between persons and corroding the social trust on which free societies depend. Kevin wrote the book on this, Trust in a Polarized Age, and he warns too of dramatic “intelligence inequalities,” in which the few firms or nations commanding vast AI societies wield near-total economic and military dominance.

Many Christians feel an instinctive aversion to all this. Kevin’s counsel is that abstention is the truly dangerous option. History bears him out. When the Church has retreated from new paradigms of power, as portions of it did during the industrial revolution and the ideological convulsions of the twentieth century, those instruments have been seized by others and turned against her.

If Christians leave AI to the transhumanists, they forfeit their seat at the table where the technology will be governed. The faithful presence that put Scripture on the wire in 1844 must be present at this creation too.

Kevin closes with practical counsel: test frontier models rather than judging AI by its free tiers; outsource the menial to preserve time and attention for nobler pursuits; skip “prompt engineering” and simply ask the model to write its own best prompt. He even confesses to venting minor workplace frustrations to a machine rather than gossiping to a colleague, sparing real reputations and real relationships.

But there are limits, AI can summarize theological texts or prompt us to prayer, but it must never simulate the spiritual life itself. No machine can pray in our place, and none can replace a spiritual director or a friend. The measure of the technology is whether it protects and improves human relationships, never whether it replaces them.

That was Morse’s posture in the Capitol chamber, and it should be ours: hands on the instrument, eyes lifted higher, asking of every new power the old question, what hath God wrought?

It is a beautiful vision of liberty as a generational project: each generation securing for the next the freedom to pursue higher things. But the vision contains a hidden assumption. It works only if each generation actually hands down what it has learned, if the children who study poetry still understand why their grandfathers studied war. When the transmission fails, the inheritance is squandered.

The failure of transmission is the subject of the latest episode of Acton Line. I had a wonderful conversation with Stephanie Slade, senior editor at Reason and fellow in Liberal Studies at the Acton Institute, to discuss her new book, Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right.

Fusionism was the postwar synthesis, articulated in the early American conservative movement by Frank Meyer, that joined the classical liberal defense of individual freedom to the Christian tradition of moral virtue. Its central insight was that these two commitments are not rivals but mutually dependent: virtue that is coerced is no virtue at all, for the good must be freely chosen; and a free society cannot long endure among a people without moral character. This synthesis became the philosophical foundation of the American conservative movement and carried it to its greatest political triumphs.

Slade observes how those triumphs bred complacency. After Reagan, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, fusionism’s heirs no longer failed to explain and defend their first principles. The movement grew adept at winning elections and negligent in forming minds. A generation inherited the institutions of conservatism without inheriting its convictions.

Into that vacuum has rushed a new generation of intellectual entrepreneurs and hucksters who argue that liberty itself is the obstacle to virtue, that the freedom fusionism prized is precisely what hollowed out the moral order it hoped to preserve. Their remedy is to seize the levers of state power and impose from above what persuasion failed to secure. Slade calls these folks the dissident right, “will to power conservatives.”

Slade warns that abandoning classical liberal institutions, the rule of law chief among them, in pursuit of top-down moral renewal does not produce virtue. It produces unworkable and authoritarian extremes, and it destroys the very moral character it claims to defend. Compliance compelled forms no souls. Lord Acton understood this: liberty is not a means to a higher political end but the highest political end itself, required “for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society, and of private life.”

Where, then, is the way forward? Slade’s answer is that young people drifting toward illiberal alternatives are not, at bottom, seeking technocratic policy or economic efficiency. They are starving for answers to the oldest questions: What is a good life? What is it for? A conservatism that offers them only marginal tax rates has nothing to say to their deepest hunger.

The remedy is a re-engagement with philosophy, theology, and the humanities. A return to the moral and intellectual formation that the movement neglected in its decades of electoral success. A return to the work of transmission.

Which brings us back to Adams in Paris. His generational sequence doesn’t run in one direction only, as though politics could be studied once and then forgotten. Every generation must take up the study anew, must learn again why liberty is worth securing and what it is for. The liberty to study philosophy is earned, in every age, by those willing to make the argument for liberty itself. Both liberty and virtue are non-negotiable and both must be handed down, or they will not be held at all.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube:

Sri Ramakrishna went beyond conventional morality and stressed purity, which is the real basis and aim of all moral codes and conduct. The difference between conventional morality and purity is to be noted here. Morality is the basis of religion; whereas purity is the basis of spirituality. Morality is how we appear to other people; purity is how we appear to God. Morality is conformity to codes of conduct and behaviour, whereas purity is freedom from the hold of past samskaras [psychological imprints] of desires and instinctual drives.

Swami Bhajanananda, The Light of the Modern World (Advaita Ashrama, 2012), 223-224.

Give it a listen:

If Newton could be undone by speculation, none of us should trust our instincts in the market. On the latest episode of Acton Line, I sat down with David Bahnsen, founder and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group and author of Profit from the Profit: The Past, Present & Future of Dividend Growth Investing, to talk about what the alternative to speculation actually looks like, and why the answer is as much moral as it is financial.

David draws a distinction at the beginning of our conversation that governs everything that follows: investing is putting capital into human action and long-term wealth creation. Speculation is something else entirely, a wager on price movements. It is an attempt to profit from the crowd’s next mood rather than from any enterprise’s real productivity.

The trouble is that speculation is increasingly marketed as investing. The gamification of markets: meme stocks, zero-commission trading apps, and the daily churn of financial media has made investing feel like being a shooter at a craps table. David’s finds that human nature, left to its own devices, makes for a poor investor. We are wired to chase what is rising and flee what is falling, which is precisely backwards. Discipline is not one virtue among many in investing, it is the whole game.

So why dividends? The obvious answer is cash flow: a rising stream of income that compounds over decades and does not depend on selling shares into whatever market happens to prevail. But the deeper answer, and the one that animates David’s whole approach, is about accountability.

A dividend is a kind of social contract between a company’s management and its owners. The obligation to return real cash to shareholders, quarter after quarter, disciplines executives in a way no mission statement ever could. Balance sheets must be managed soberly. Vanity projects and empire-building become harder to justify when money must actually be paid out. The dividend, in other words, tells the truth about a business, and it keeps the business honest in the telling.

It would be easy to let the matter rest there as a question of prudent strategy, but our conversation deepened to a discussion of growth itself is a theological concept.

Wealth creation is not a zero-sum scramble over a fixed pile of cash. It is the fruit of human dignity expressed through work and innovation, men and women made in the image of God, meeting real human needs through real enterprise. To invest in that process is to participate in it. The numbers on the screen symbols of something concrete: goods shipped, services rendered, problems solved, and families provided for. Stewardship is not merely the careful preservation of what we have been given but its faithful cultivation over time. The parable’s servant who buried his talent in the ground was not being cautious, he was being faithless.

Which brings us back to Newton. His failure in 1720 was not a failure of intellect but virtue. The madness of crowds is not calculated away; it is resisted, and resistance requires virtues: patience, discipline, humility about what we cannot know, and fidelity to what we can.

Dividend growth investing is not a trick for beating the market but a framework for staying sane inside it, ordered toward long-term stewardship rather than short-term price fluctuations. Newton could chart the heavens, but he couldn’t time the market. Investors need not be speculators, they can simply hold good companies, collect what they produce, and let time and do the work.

More than half a century later, the famines Ehrlich prophesied never came, but strangely the fear persists. Many still think the earth is bursting at the seems with humanity while the reality is that, if current trends continue, there won’t be too many people but too few. On the latest episode of Acton Line, I sat down with my colleague Stephen Barrows, economist and chief operating officer of the Acton Institute, to ask how we got the future so wrong and what a truer account of the human person might tell us about the demographic questions now pressing upon us.

Across most of the world, fertility rates have fallen below the replacement level. A consistent demographic trend with serious momentum. Just as a growing population compounds across generations, a shrinking one does too: fewer children today mean fewer parents tomorrow, and the arithmetic gets harder to reverse the longer it runs. Barrows walks through the social and economic challenges that follow: shrinking workforces supporting growing numbers of retirees, strained welfare systems, and hollowed-out communities.

Yet the old fears linger. The Malthusian intuition that people are a drain on a fixed stock of resources still shapes how many think about children, family, and the future.

The error runs from Thomas Malthus in the eighteenth century to Ehrlich in the twentieth. The error is counting human beings as stomachs and mouths alone while forgetting that they come with minds and muscles. Human beings, Barrows argues, are net problem solvers, bringing more into the world through creativity, innovation, and work than they consume.

This is not naïve optimism but a claim about human nature. Why, Barrows asks, do we face material scarcity at all? His answer is arresting: scarcity is an occasion for virtue. The limits of the material world call forth precisely those excellences, ingenuity, diligence, cooperation, service to one another through productive work, that constitute so much of a life well lived. We are made to meet constraints and, in meeting them, to be perfected.

The evidence bears this out. Barrows points to the economics of “time prices”: measuring the cost of goods not in dollars but in the hours of labor required to earn them. By that measure, nearly everything has grown radically more abundant over time. The hours of work that once bought a bushel of wheat now buy many. Scarcity retreats before human creativity, not automatically, but wherever people are free to innovate, exchange, and serve one another.

Economics can take us this far, but not all the way. Drawing on Pope Benedict XVI, Barrows insists that human existence cannot be reduced to transaction. A child considered as a line item on a household balance sheet will always look like a liability; the categories themselves are the problem. Children are not costs to be managed but gifts to be received, the supreme gift, to families and to societies. What Benedict called the logic of gift stands as a rebuke to every accounting of human life that begins and ends with the ledger.

It is a case Barrows and his wife, Dr. Kimberly Barrows, will soon make at book length in their forthcoming One More: The Case for Another Child.

Paul Ehrlich told Johnny Carson’s audience that the battle was over and humanity had lost. He was wrong twice: wrong about the outcome, and wrong about what human beings are. The battle to feed humanity was never really a battle at all, because every generation arrives bearing the means of its own provision: minds, hands, and hearts.

Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. (Luke 15:4-7)

Luke Burgis spent years trying is decipher this arithmetic. His wrestling with it produced his new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion, and it is the subject of my conversation with him on the latest episode of Acton Line.

Burgis is best known for Wanting, his very successful popularization of René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. The theory gives a counterintuitive account of our own desires which are not generated from within but caught from without. From the conscious and more often unconscious imitation of models. In The One and the Ninety-Nine that insight is extended from what we want to who we are. If desire is contagious, so is identity. The parable becomes the hermeneutical key to the digital age. Imitation is not so much a flaw in human nature as its grammar. Anxieties personal, intellectual, and cultural now spread at the speed of light through digital crowds which now fit in pockets.

Frictionless digital spaces—feeds, group chats, quote-tweets—make it easier to both flee into isolation or dissolve into the crowd. The acute challenge is found in remaining ourselves while remaining connected to others.

Against both temptations Burgis sets what he calls, borrowing from family systems theory, the “solid self.” A self capable of remaining grounded and calm in anxious environments. This is the only sort of person capable of deep and meaningful relationships, because only such a person has a self to give rather than a self perpetually shaped by external pressure.

How is such a self forged? By cultivating one-on-one relationships within our families, churches, and institutions rather than encountering one another only as members of groups. Burgis speaks movingly of his own family’s experience of caregiving, and we range from there into education and artificial intelligence. The remedy is recovering our capacity to encounter transcendence: the true, the good, the beautiful, and, Lord willing, the Lord himself.

Which brings us back to the shepherd. His arithmetic is only strange if a sheep is just a fraction of a flock. One out of ninety-nine. It is perfectly sound if each one is irreplaceable. The parable is not bad accounting but an illustration of God’s economy, one in which the person is never simply one of the many.

Listen to the whole conversation:

That last phrase should sound familiar to anyone who followed the debate over the “common good” raged across X this past week. It was offered up, nearly verbatim, as a definition of the common good itself. But a definition that cannot distinguish the common good from a lighthouse has mistaken a part for the whole and ignored more than two millennia of philosophical and theological reflection in the Christian West.

That conviction is at the heart of my essay published Sunday in The Dispatch‘s Dispatch Faith newsletter, “The New Right Is Wrong About the ‘Common Good.’”

The Catholic Church has engaged in a rich, sustained reflection on the common good for some 2,000 years. The Catechism, quoting the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et spes, defines it as “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.” And it names three essential elements: respect for the fundamental and inalienable rights of the human person, the social well-being and development of the group, and the stability and security of a just order.

Note what comes first. Any honest grappling with the common good must include a serious commitment to the rights of the human person as a part of and not an obstacle to its realization. This is why the “zero-sum dispute” between the common good and individual liberty, so confidently framed by voices on the new right, dissolves under examination. As Lord Acton observed, the Catholic notion of liberty “denies that general interests can supersede individual rights.” When postliberals celebrate Franco’s regime or argue for the military occupation of American cities, they do not defend the common good. They discredit it.

After the essay published, I had a thought-provoking exchange on X with Ken Craycraft, professor of moral theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Cincinnati, who shared with me his own recent column in The Boston Pilot, “What is the ‘common good,’ anyway?”

Readers of both pieces will find a lot of convergence. Craycraft and I draw from the same wells: Gaudium et spes, the Catechism, and the four permanent principles of Catholic social doctrine: human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity. He rightly insists that the common good cannot be reduced to a calculation or spreadsheet, and his list of policies incompatible with human flourishing includes restrictions on freedom of religion, assembly, and travel.

Where we differ is in diagnosis and emphasis. Craycraft sees the recent debate as driven by classical liberals and libertarians who equate the common good with totalitarian collectivism. My concern runs in the other direction: not that the common good is invoked too often, but that it is invoked too thinly and even cynically.

Read the full essay at The Dispatch, and Kenneth Craycraft’s column at The Boston Pilot.

A century and a half later, in the year of America’s semiquincentennial, Brazil confronts a darker marvel: not that the voice can travel, but that it can be stopped.

This week on Acton Line I welcome back Marcel van Hattem, Brazilian congressman, journalist, and political scientist representing the state of Rio Grande do Sul, to discuss the state of free speech in his country and the perilous state of its institutions.

When Marcel first joined me on Acton Line last year, Brazil was in the midst of a constitutional crisis: a Supreme Court asserting ever-broader powers over the press, over social media platforms, and over the speech of ordinary citizens. Journalists deplatformed. Accounts banned. An entire social network switched off ahead of an election. That crisis has not passed. It has matured, and its fruits are now ripening across Brazilian public life.

Marcel knows this pressure firsthand. He has been investigated, threatened, and, in a scene seen around the world, had his microphone cut on the floor of the Chamber of Deputies. His witness raises questions that reach well beyond Brazil: What does the rule of law require when the guardians of the law become its greatest threat? How does a legislator fulfill his duties under authoritarian pressure? And what do free peoples everywhere owe one another when liberty is imperiled in one of the world’s largest democracies?

Censorship is never just policy, but claim about persons. That some may speak while others must be spoken for. A free society rests on the opposite conviction: that every person bears the dignity, and with it the duty, of bearing witness to the truth as they understand it.

This is why this year’s Brazilian elections matter so much. Marcel explains what change in the Senate would mean for the cause of liberty, why liberty-minded legislators cannot simply wait out the storm, and what ordinary Brazilians are doing to reclaim their constitutional inheritance.

Lord Acton reminds us that “liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.” It is required, he wrote, “for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society, and of private life.” When the state presumes to decide which voices may be heard, it does not merely regulate politics; it forecloses the pursuit of those highest objects for everyone.

Dom Pedro II did not keep his throne; a coup deposed him in 1889, and Brazil’s constitutional history has been turbulent ever since. But his astonishment in Philadelphia still instructs. The human voice carrying farther than it ever had was the wonder of 1876. The wonder of 2026 is that men and women like Marcel van Hattem need to insist, at real personal cost, that their voices be allowed to carry at all.

That gap between the celebration and the commitment is, the subject of this week’s episode of Acton Line. My friend and mentor Bradley J. Birzer, the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies at Hillsdale College, and I talked about his new book, The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty. It arrives in this semiquincentennial year as a welcome invitation to read our founding document again in the company of the people who wrote it.

We are accustomed to reading the Declaration as a lawyer’s brief against George III or a philosopher’s argument for natural rights. Birzer does not deny it is both. But he insists it is something more: a moral document that embodies a people capable of virtue with a robust traditions of self-government.

They inherited these traditions above all from Cicero. They knew his writings intimately. His Roman republic haunted their imaginations as model and warning. Republics are fragile things. Rights alone do not sustain them. It takes citizens formed in prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude to keep a republic once you have one. In our conversation, Birzer traces how these classical virtues are not merely background to the Declaration but woven into its very structure and argument.

Birzer’s boldest claim is that what Christianity accomplished theologically in proclaiming human dignity, the Declaration accomplished, or would eventually accomplish, politically.

Our conversation also takes up the dramatic narrative at the heart of the book—the crowded months from 1774 through 1776, the debates in Congress, Jefferson’s drafting and the revisions that followed, and the controversy the Declaration attracted from the moment the ink dried. The document we now treat as self-evident was anything but self-evident to its first readers.

That, perhaps, is the most useful lesson of the semiquincentennial. Two hundred fifty years on, we are tempted to treat the Declaration as a finished monument, something to be admired and then returned to its case. The signers knew better. The Declaration they signed was not a conclusion but a beginning, a radical experiment that would demand of them, and of every generation after them, the republican virtues it presupposed. The fireworks belong to July 4. The work belongs to every day after.

Listen to my full conversation with Brad Birzer on Acton Line:

The Luddites asked the right question and answered it badly. Two centuries later, the question has returned with new urgency, and it is ours to answer better.

On this week’s episode of Acton Line, I sit down with my colleague Dan Churchwell, the Acton Institute’s director of programs and education, whose research sits at the intersection of media ecology, technological ethics, and the future of work. Our subject is faith and work in a technological age.

The fourth industrial revolution, with its fusion of physical, digital, and biological systems, is reshaping economic life with a speed and scope that earlier transformations did not possess. The stocking frame displaced the weaver over decades; today’s technologies promise, or threaten, to remake whole professions within a career, sometimes within a news cycle. The anxiety this produces deserves better than the two responses our culture reflexively offers: breathless assurance that the machines will solve everything, and apocalyptic warnings that they will destroy us. Both concede too much to the machine.

The deeper danger is not economic but spiritual. Historians have observed that faith in technological progress has long functioned as a kind of American civil religion, the one creed a nation of many creeds could share. When that faith hardens into certainty, we begin to confuse the vast possibilities of our tools with divine power itself, and to measure human beings by the machine’s own standard: output, efficiency, productivity.

This is the accounting that broke the Luddites. If a man is worth what his labor fetches, then a machine that outproduces him has judged him and found him wanting. A civilization that worships its tools will, sooner or later, sacrifice its people on that altar.

The Christian tradition keeps a different ledger. Our worth is not earned at a workstation but given in creation: we bear the image of God, and no innovation in productivity can amend that endowment. Work, rightly understood, is not mere output but vocation, a participation in God’s ongoing creative and providential care for the world, whether exercised at a loom, a keyboard, or a kitchen sink.

This conviction does not resolve every practical difficulty, and Dan and I do not pretend otherwise. What does vocation mean when the task you trained for can be automated? How should Christians think about stewarding technologies whose consequences outrun their creators’ intentions? These questions demand discernment rather than slogans, but discernment requires a fixed point, and the doctrine of human dignity provides one: the person is never a cost to be optimized away.

The Luddites had no grammar of worth beyond the wage, and so when the wage was threatened, everything was. Their hammers were a kind of grief. The tradition Dan and I both work within offers what they lacked: an account of the human person whose value precedes and survives every economic revolution, including this one.

The frames, in the end, were rebuilt. The question the frame-breakers asked still waits, in every generation, for a better answer.

You can listen to my conversation with Dan Churchwell on this week’s episode of Acton Line, available wherever you get your podcasts, or watch it here:

That would be a pleasant enough story about any neighborhood. About Fishtown, it is something more. Because Fishtown was not supposed to have a future. It had been assigned a different role in the American story: the cautionary tale.

In 2012, Charles Murray published Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, and the old riverside Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown, working class since before the Revolution, became a national byword. Murray used it as his emblem of everything unraveling in blue-collar America: marriage rates cut in half, men drifting out of the labor force, pews emptying, crime climbing. “Fishtown” ceased to be a place and became a data set, shorthand for decline itself.

Statistics have their uses. They can reveal what anecdote conceals. But a statistic is a snapshot, and neighborhoods do not hold still for the camera. While Fishtown was serving as the nation’s favorite symbol of working-class collapse, actual Fishtowners went on living, working, building, and, as it turns out, reviving.

On this week’s episode of Acton Line, I talk with my colleague Noah Gould, who traveled to Fishtown and reported what he found for The Wall Street Journal. The short version: the poster child of decline is booming.

Noah is no romantic about this. Gentrification carries real costs, and the longtime residents he spoke with feel them: rising rents, familiar faces departing, and the strangeness of watching your corner bar become a cocktail lounge. He does not gloss over any of it. But the story Fishtowners themselves tell is not primarily one of displacement. It is, in their own telling, a feel-good story: a community hammered by decades of economic shifts that is enjoying a genuine comeback.

It is easy, from a distance, to sort every changing neighborhood into one of two prefabricated narratives: decline or displacement, ruin or ruination-by-renewal. Noah went and listened.

What strikes me most about Fishtown’s turnaround: no one decreed it. There was no federal renewal program with the neighborhood’s name on it, no master plan drawn up in a distant office. What happened instead was the patient, unglamorous work of civil society. Entrepreneurs taking risks on an old factory floor, newcomers and longtime residents negotiating a common life, with institutions rebuilt block by block and storefront by storefront.

This is the kind of renewal that declinist narratives, left and right, have trouble seeing. We are awash in obituaries for working-class America, and the grief behind them is often sincere. Real things were lost in Fishtown, and Murray was not wrong to count them. But the ledger of communities is never closed. Where renewal comes, it tends to look less like policy and more like neighborliness. It rarely makes the news. Noah’s reporting is a welcome exception.

Fishtown entered the national imagination as a statistic. It deserves to be known again as a neighborhood. A particular place where particular people are doing the ancient human work of making a home together, in buildings their great-grandparents would recognize even if the menus would baffle them.

The factories are still there. They are just full of life again.

Watch my full conversation with Noah Gould on YouTube:

That refusal sits at the center of the argument my colleague Thomas Dias makes on the newest Acton Line. The conversation was inspired by his writing in Public Discourse. There Thomas set two New Yorkers side by side, Dorothy Day and Zohran Mamdani. He examined the tensions between their approaches to the serving their city’s poor.

Day arrived in New York in 1916 and, apart from her travels, never really left; she died at Maryhouse in Manhattan in 1980. With Peter Maurin she founded the Catholic Worker movement in 1933. A newspaper, but above all houses of hospitality that fed the hungry and sheltered the homeless. More than 180 of them still operate today.

She had come to this work the long way around. As a young woman she moved through the city’s radical movements of socialism, communism, and syndicalism. Then the Christian anarchism of Tolstoy and finally converting to Catholicism in 1927. What changed was not her concern for the poor but her account of their poverty. Her whole experience, she wrote, had been that “our failure has been not to love enough.” Her remedy was correspondingly personal: the poor were to be met, fed, and known face to face, by hands that could not hand the task to anyone else.

Zohran Mamdani, now the mayor of the same city, shares Day’s concern but almost none of her method. His platform locates the remedy for poverty in political power: rent freezes for the rent-stabilized, hundreds of thousands of new affordable units, government-run grocery stores, and universal childcare. The strategy is to win power, staff it with allies, and legislate. It is a theory of change that runs through the machinery of the state rather than through the encounter of persons.

Thomas is careful not to caricature this. Mamdani is no cynic, and the provision of material goods is a real good. The question is whether it is a sufficient one.

Here Thomas reaches for Hilaire Belloc, whose 1912 warning about the Servile State identified the danger precisely: a society that secures the body’s provision by making men permanently dependent on the power that provides it. Such an arrangement can fill a stomach. What it cannot do is the very thing Day thought indispensable: to meet a person as a person, and in doing so restore the dignity that provision alone leaves untouched.

The fault line, then, is not fiscal but anthropological. For Day, loving the poor was an act that could not be assigned to a bureau, because a love that is delegated is no longer quite love. The modern state, by contrast, converts charity into a transfer: efficient, scalable, and impersonal. Its great temptation is to let the institution will what only we can will, and to mistake the smooth functioning of the transfer for the work of encounter.

Which returns us to the woman on the bench. The road she walked of voluntary poverty, repeated arrests, and a lifetime of meeting the poor where they were was a hard one. It is also humanizing. It refuses the shortcut of handing our obligations to someone, or something, else. Day’s radical call to love still rings.

Two New Yorkers, two answers—listen to the full conversation on Acton Line:

I had the pleasure of taking up precisely this question last week with John Daly and Thomas Howes on the Reagan Caucus Action podcast. Our conversation ranged widely across two centuries, several encyclicals, and the varied threats to the liberty we too often take for granted. The supposed contradiction between political liberalism dissolves under honest examination and careful distinctions.

The Acton Institute, where I serve as a research fellow and where I host the Acton Line podcast, exists to make exactly that case. We are not a partisan policy shop, and I tried to be clear with John and Thomas about the distinction. Our aim is not to win the next election but to promote a free and virtuous society in which liberty is sustained, rather than corroded, by religious principle. The two are not adversaries. Strip virtue out of freedom and you are left with mere license; strip freedom out of virtue and you are left with coercion in the costume of piety.

This insight is central to a whole tradition of nineteenth-century thinkers, Lord Acton chief among them, who labored to reconcile the Catholic faith with constitutional government, freedom of conscience and of speech, and the free economy. These men were not liberals in the impoverished modern sense, that rationalistic and atomistic creed which holds tradition and institutions in contempt. Theirs was the older, organic liberalism that understands freedom as the necessary condition for human beings to pursue the good together. Acton found the seed of that liberty not in the Enlightenment but in the Gospel itself: in Christ’s instruction to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s, words that, as Acton observed, set bounds upon the state that it had never before been made to acknowledge.

The twentieth century furnished its own vindication. We spoke about Pope St. John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus, his great encyclical marking the hundredth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, in which the pope, who took the trouble to consult some of the finest economists of his day, affirmed a free economy set within a strong juridical framework, an economy ordered to the whole of human freedom rather than against it. It was not an unqualified blessing of capitalism. It was something better and more durable: a humanistic account of why markets, rightly bounded, can serve human dignity rather than diminish it.

If all of this sounds comfortably historical, the latter half of our conversation was anything but. I gave John and Thomas my candid assessment of the obstacles to freedom in 2026, and they are not few. Abroad, liberty faces open hostility from authoritarian regimes that regard it as a species of weakness. At home, the threat is subtler and, to my mind, sadder—a growing impatience with the liberal settlement among Christians themselves. Among some Protestants it takes the shape of Christian nationalism; among some Roman Catholics, of integralism. Both are tempted to cut through the Gordian knot of a pluralistic society with the sword of political power. Both misread the very tradition they mean to defend.

We closed on the question of war and the papacy, drawing on a piece I recently wrote for The Dispatch. There has been a great deal of confusion about the pope’s role in moments of conflict. The Holy Father is not a geopolitical referee, called to adjudicate this or that campaign. He is an advocate for peace, and his office obliges him to remind a forgetful world of an old and sober truth: a war that would eradicate a civilization can never, under any doctrine worthy of the name, be called just.

Which brings us back to where we began. “Catholic liberal” is not an oxymoron. Properly understood, it is closer to a redundancy, a name for the conviction that the God who made us free intended us to remain so. I’m grateful to the Reagan Caucus Action for the chance to make that case, and I’d commend the full conversation to you.

Watch the full episode here:

On the latest episode of Acton Line, I spoke with James M. Patterson, associate professor in the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee and president of the Ciceronian Society, about Why Postliberalism Failed, the book he has written with Thomas Howes and published with the Acton Institute. It is a polemic that wins its argument less by assertion than by evidence.

Postliberalism offers a seductive narrative, especially to disaffected young Catholics. The story goes that liberalism is not merely flawed but founding-level corrupt, that the American order is a machine for manufacturing atomized consumers, and that the remedy is a confessional state strong enough to order society toward the good. Tear out the rotten liberal root, the argument runs, and a flourishing Christian civilization will grow in its place. The trouble, as Patterson and Howes demonstrate, is that we already know how it ends. We know because it has been tried.

The signal achievement of Why Postliberalism Failed is to replace speculation with the historical record. The authors trace postliberalism’s intellectual lineage to two unlovely sources: an extreme papalism that subordinates all political authority to the Church, and a reactionary European tradition that explained the rise of liberal modernity as a conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons against throne and altar. These streams converged into an ideology that animated regime after regime in the interwar years.

Franco’s Spain, Vichy France, Tiso’s Slovakia, Pavelić’s Croatia—everywhere the postliberal vision was actually implemented, it produced the same harvest: economic stagnation, the persecution of dissenters, and the moral compromise of the Church it claimed to serve. In several cases it shaded into collaboration with genocide. This is not the fever dream of liberalism’s defenders; it is the documented career of postliberalism wherever it touched real power. Contemporary postliberals, in far too many cases, have not merely echoed these older thinkers but praised the regimes themselves, drinking, as Patterson and Howes put it, from the same poisoned wells.

There is a grim irony here that Acton would have savored. A program advertised as the salvation of the faith has, in practice, reliably delivered emptier pews and fuller graves.

What rescues the book from mere demolition is that it has something to defend. The American Catholic experience never required the dismantling of the constitutional order to live faithfully within it. Archbishop John Hughes, James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop John Ireland, Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and John Courtney Murray were not chaplains to a regime but builders of a civil society. They raised parishes, schools, hospitals, and charities that served millions, and they did so under a constitution that protected the free exercise of conscience rather than commandeering it. Their lives are the standing refutation of the postliberal premise: a faithful Church does not need a captive state.

This in not merely an American prejudice. The Second Vatican Council, in Dignitatis Humanae, already settled the matter the postliberals would reopen, recognizing religious liberty as a demand of human dignity rather than a concession to error. This project is not a bold recovery of tradition. It is a quarrel the Church has already had and resolved.

Acton’s maxim is usually deployed against secular ambition, but he meant it more broadly, and the broader meaning is the one postliberalism has forgotten. Power corrupts, and it does not become safe simply because the hand that wields it is consecrated. The confessional state does not sanctify politics; it secularizes the altar. The likeliest fruit of fusing throne and altar is not a renewed Christendom but a discredited Church. This lesson taught plainly across the twentieth century for those with ears to hear.

Patterson and Howes have written that lesson down with rigor and verve. It is, as I told James, a book whose timeliness is matched only by its unwelcomeness in certain quarters. A sure sign that a book is worth reading.

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: