Welcome to Acton Line, a product of the Acton Institute promoting a free and virtuous society.

I'm Mark Townsend, producer.

You can find additional resources in the show notes for this episode, as well as previous episodes of Actonline at

acton.org slash podcasts. If you have a comment or an idea for a future episode, you can email

us at podcast at acton.org. Actonline is available to stream on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube,

and Acton.org.

Welcome. My name is Dan Huger, librarian and research associate at the Acton Institute.

And today I'm joined by Chris Marron, co-founder and president of the Acton Institute.

We're here to talk about sort of all things Acton Institute.

We, Acton Line is, of course, the Acton Institute's podcast, but rarely do we do an overall view of the Action Institute from the top.

We did something like this last year, but we've got video this year.

So this is going to be the first time that we'll be coming at you in 3D, all of us, and not just audio.

And Chris, welcome to Actonline, and thank you for being with us.

Yeah, thanks, Dan, and happy New Year's.

Happy New Year's.

To everyone listening to this today.

Yeah, it will be, hopefully, you'll have gotten to this before midnight.

This is coming out on New Year's Eve.

And we're kind of like looking back at the year of what Acton's done, what we're planning to do. And I guess, well, let's go back all the way to the very, very beginning. Because all of these, all of these institutions have seeds and ideas. And this is one of the things that were big on at Acton, that ideas

are sort of motive forces in history. This is something that Lord Acton very much believed.

What was that core sort of idea that the Acton Institute grew out of?

Well, the core idea was connecting reality, who we are as persons, and we can frame that

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