ActonInstitute

Why did Pope Pius XII excommunicate Catholics involved in the communist movement? Rev. Robert Sirico, President Emeritus of the Acton Institute, joined Bill O'Reilly 's No Spin News to discuss.

Link to watch in the comments.

Too often, critics and supporters alike treat the American founding as an Enlightenment project that emerged fully formed in 1776. But the ideas behind it run far deeper: through Augustine and Aquinas, the Magna Carta, medieval scholastics, centuries of English common law, and the Bible, which accounts for 34% of the references in the founders' writings. Locke? Just 2.7%.

Michael Matheson Miller argues that robbing the founding of that pedigree, whether to critique or to celebrate it, robs America of its authentic exceptionalism.

"If we forget what the founders knew, we risk losing what they fought to preserve."

"Spiritual but not religious" feels like a modern invention, but it isn't.

J.C. Scharl reviews Michael Horton's Shaman & Sage, a dense and fascinating survey tracing the human impulse to seek individual encounter with the transcendent all the way back to the Bronze Age. From Egyptian myths to Orphic cults to Neo-Platonists to TikTok seers, the longing is the same.

Scharl's conclusion: Christ's Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection are "the answer to the longing in every human heart, even the weird and wild ones."

Read the full review at the link in the comments.

"Freedom and peace emerge not from the river or the rambling life per se but from the benevolent actions of good people."

As the nation's 250th birthday approaches, Cassandra Nelson revisits Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in Religion & Liberty Online. "The Great American Novel" still has plenty to say about freedom, conscience, and who we want to be.

Read the full piece. Link in the comments.