Joe Carter

Joe Carter is a Senior Editor at the Acton Institute. Joe also serves as an editor at the The Gospel Coalition, a communications specialist for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and as an adjunct professor of journalism at Patrick Henry College. He is the editor of the NIV Lifehacks Bible and co-author of How to Argue like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History's Greatest Communicator (Crossway).

Posts by Joe Carter

U.S. Scientists: Maybe Climate Engineering Isn’t Such a Smart Idea

For at least forty years, scientists and policy makers have considered addressing climate related issues by means of climate engineering, or as it more commonly referred to, geoengineering. A prime example is found in a story published in Newsweek that proposed (albeit with reservations) to use geoengineering to fix a climatic “problem”: Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. Continue Reading...

Fossil Fuel Divestment: Economically Reckless and Morally Callous

“Who cares about the suffering and premature death of millions in the developing world?” asks Bruce Edward Walker in this week’s Acton Commentary.”Not religious activists agitating for fossil fuel divestment.” In another trendy move, environmentalist shareholder activists are pressuring energy companies in which they invest to scale back in part or completely their interests in oil, gas and coal. Continue Reading...

How Christianity Gave Us the Modern World

“Christianity undergirded the development of Western liberalism (in the old, good sense of the word),” says Rich Lowry. In fact, without Christianity there would probably not be anything like what we conceive as true liberty: The indispensable role of Christianity in the creation of individual rights and ultimately of secularism itself is the subject of the revelatory new intellectual history Inventing the Individual by Larry Siedentop. Continue Reading...

What Happened to the Bill of Rights?

When the Founding Fathers were drafting the U.S. Constitution, they didn’t initially consider adding a Bill of Rights to protect citizens because it was deemed unnecessary. It was only after the Constitution’s supporters realized such a bill was essential to getting approved by the states that they proposed enumerating such rights in twelve amendments. Continue Reading...

Federal Court Rules Religious Organizations Can Hire (and Fire) for Religious Reasons

Earlier today a federal appeals court handed down an important ruling that protects the liberties of religious organizations. In the case of Alyce Conlon v. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit rejected a plaintiff’s attempt to enforce state and federal gender discrimination laws on one of the nation’s largest Christian campus ministries. Continue Reading...

Explainer: President Obama’s FY2016 Budget

What is the President’s budget? Technically, it’s only a budget request—a proposal telling Congress how much money the President believes should be spent on the various Cabinet-level federal functions, like agriculture, defense, education, etc. Continue Reading...