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The Gulag Lives On – But Not in Our Culture
Thursday, November 19, 2009
'Waiting to be shot' by Nikolai Getman
Getman, whose work based on Gulag life is on display at the Heritage Foundation through Dec. 10. As Heritage explains it, “Getman began painting the scenes in secret once freed in 1953 after eight years’ forced labor in Siberia and Kolyma. His own crime? He’d been in the company of a fellow artist who had mocked Stalin with a tiny drawing.” Crandall asks an important question in his article:
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Category: Acton Commentary, General
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gulag, heritage foundation, Nikolai Getman, stalin
Messianic Marxism
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
From “The Origin of Russian Communism” by Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev (published by Geoffrey Bles, 1937):
(more…)
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Category: News and Events
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berlin wall, Lenin, marxism, nicholas berdyaev
Earned Success = Happiness
Friday, October 30, 2009
David Bahnsen reflects on last night’s annual dinner:
Read “The Left Doesn’t Want You to Be Happy.”
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Category: General
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Acton annual dinner, Arthur Brooks, David Bahnsen, Rev. Robert A. Sirico
What is a Christian to think about health care?
Friday, October 30, 2009
Brad Green, who teaches theology at Union University in Jackson, Tenn., published a commentary on health care in The Jackson Sun. Green, an alum of Acton’s Toward a Free and Virtuous Society program, is also a co-founder of Augustine School in Jackson.
Read “What is a Christian to think about health care?”
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Category: General
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Brad Green, health care reform, toward a free and virtuous society
Green Patriarch’s ‘web of life’ has a gaping hole in it
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I offered a commentary related to his recently closed environmental symposium in New Orleans. He said this:
Words pleasing to the ear, perhaps. But the Patriarch’s environmental ethic has a hollow core. Writing on the blog of the American Orthodox Institute, I have shown how for nearly 20 years Bartholomew has issued equivocations and evasions on the Orthodox Church’s clear teaching on the sanctity of life. And it goes on. This is from his 2008 book, “Encountering the Mystery: Understanding Orthodox Christianity Today” (p. 150):
In stark contrast to this statement, see the Russian Orthodox Church’s clear and unambiguous position in its statement on the Orthodox Church and Society:
Of course, the hollow core of Bartholomew’s environmental ethic leaves the Green Patriarch’s ministry open to all sorts of anti-human vulnerabilities. As Rev. Johannes L. Jacobse, president of AOI, has written in response:
Having wrapped up his environmental program, Bartholomew is now preparing for a round of briefings in Washington with Democratic Party leaders and a meeting with President Obama that is being arranged by John Podesta of the Center for American Progress. CAP is also co-sponsoring a speech by Bartholomew with Georgetown University on Nov. 3.
Read A patriarch who, ‘generally speaking, respects human life’ on the Observer blog at AOI.
A bit of background. (more…)
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Category: News and Events
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Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Green Patriarch, Orthodox Church, religious environmentalism, sanctity of life
‘Tax adventurism’ on upsurge
Monday, September 28, 2009
From a report in today’s Washington Times:
Among the nuisances: car-rental taxes and hotel taxes, the “Amazon” tax on Internet purchases, cameras catching speeders and people running red lights, bridge and toll taxes, increased fees for marriage licenses and dog tags, etc.
The report noted that “although cigarette taxes were raised 57 times between 2003 and 2007, the tax increases met revenue projections only 16 times … ”
Says Muhtar Kent, chief executive officer of Coca-Cola Co., about calls to impose soda and fat taxes: “I have never seen it work where a government tells people what to eat and what to drink. If it worked, the Soviet Union would still be around.”
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Category: News and Events
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Coca Cola, sin taxes
Books on the Financial Crisis
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
David L. Bahnsen, a good friend of Acton, has begun a series of reviews of books on the financial crisis. No doubt, he’ll have many to review in the months ahead.
Here’s from Bahnsen’s latest, a review of Greenspan’s Bubbles by William Fleckinstein:
Bahnsen, a financial planner and investment manager, serves on the Blackstone Faculty of the Alliance Defense Fund, and is a Cooperating Board member of the Center for Cultural Leadership, where he is the Senior Fellow of Economics and Finance.
David describes himself as …
Also, take a look at his musings on “Marketplace & Calling.”
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Category: General
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book review, David L. Bahnsen, markets & morality
Clergy and Economists: Allies Not Adversaries
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
We welcome a new contributor to the Acton Commentary crew: Dr. Dwight R. Lee, the William J. O’Neil Endowed Chair in Global Markets and Freedom at Southern Methodist University. In this week’s commentary, Lee discusses how the social objectives of clergy and economists are remarkably similar, even though their “windows on the world” suggest different approaches to achieving the shared aim of building a better, more humane society. This week’s commentary is adapted from an article to be published in the Journal of Markets & Morality (Vol. 12, No. 2; Fall 2009). Excerpt:
Read more >>>
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Category: Acton Commentary
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Dwight R. Lee, economics, markets & morality, ministry
Review: How the Byzantines Saved Europe
Monday, August 17, 2009
Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire by Judith Herrin. Princeton University Press (2008)
Ask the average college student to identify the 1,100 year old empire that was, at various points in its history, the political, commercial, artistic and ecclesiastical center of Europe and, indeed, was responsible for the very survival and flourishing of what we know today as Europe and you’re not likely to get the correct answer: Byzantium.
The reasons for this are manifold but not least is that as Western Europe came into its own in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, Byzantium gradually succumbed piecemeal to the constant conquering pressure of Ottomans and Arabs. When Constantinople finally fell in 1453 (two years after the birth of the Genoese Christopher Columbus), Europe, now cut off from many land routes to Asian trade, was already looking West and South in anticipation of the age of exploration and colonization. Byzantium, and the Christian East, would fall under Muslim domination and dhimmitude for centuries and its history would fade away before the disinterest, or ignorance, of the West.
This “condemnation to oblivion” as the editors of The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies, describe it, is “no longer quite so true as it once was.” New exhibitions of Byzantine art in Europe and America have been hugely successful in recent years and travel to cities with Byzantine landmarks and archeological sites in Greece, Turkey and the Balkans is easier than ever. Academic centers throughout western Europe and the United States host Byzantine Studies departments, scholarly journals proliferate, and a new generation of scholars has elevated the field from what once was a narrow specialty.
The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies is a useful, one volume reference work that would well serve both the scholar and general reader with an interest in Byzantine culture. The editors have prefaced the volume with a detailed assessment of the Discipline, the state of scholarly learning on everything from art history to weights and measures. Other sections examine Landscape, Land Use, and the Environment; Institutions and Relationships (including the economy); and The World Around Byzantium. Each of the nearly two dozen subheadings include concise chapters with references and suggestions for further readings.
For those interested in the economic life of Byzantium, the Handbook offers an account in Towns and Cities that describes agricultural, commercial and industrial activity, and charts a decline in these areas during periodic invasions by various waves of Slav, Avar, Persian and Ottoman peoples, or bouts of the plague. Where political and military fortunes turned favorable, as in the 8th and 9th centuries, economic life enjoyed a parallel revival. Regional cities became economic centers, places like Thessalonike, Thebes (silk textiles) and Corinth, where glass, pottery, metals and textiles were produced. In his chapter on the Economy, Alan Harvey relates how Constantinople, in the 12th Century, “was clearly a bustling city with a wide range of skilled craftsmen, merchants, artisans, petty traders. There was also a transient population of various nationalities, in addition to the more settled presence of Italian merchants.”
And, because it was a Christian empire, the Handbook has a lot to say about the Byzantine Church, its relations with the Empire, and its developing rivalry with Rome, especially as the papal reform movement took hold in the 11th century. The Emperor and Court chapter in the Handbook should also go some way toward a better understanding of “late ancient state formation,” a subject the editors say has received “remarkably little attention” by historians and political theorists.
Writing in the Handbook’s summary chapter, Cyril Mango catalogs the achievements of Byzantium but also adds that historians have not “credited [the empire] with any advance in science, philosophy, political theory, or having produced a great literature.” Maybe the Byzantines had other ambitions. James Howard-Johnston asserts that the “ultimate rationale” of Byzantium’s existence was its “Christian imperial mission.”
For the general reader, perhaps a better place to begin to illuminate the “black hole” of Byzantine history is Judith Herrin’s fine book, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire. A senior research fellow in Byzantine Studies at King’s College London, Herrin sets out to trace the period’s “most significant high points as clearly and compellingly as I can; to reveal the structures and mentalities which sustained it.” Her aim is to help the reader understand “how the modern western world, which developed from Europe, could not have existed had it not been shielded and inspired by what happened further to the east in Byzantium. The Muslim world is also an important element of this history, as is the love-hate relationship between Christendom and Islam.”
Byzantium’s ability to conquer, Herrin writes, and “above all, to defend itself and its magnificent capital was to shield the northwestern world of the Mediterranean during the chaotic but creative period that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. Without Byzantium there would have been no Europe.” (more…)
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Category: General
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Byzantium, Crusades, economics, Judith Herrin, Orthodox Church, Oxford University Press, Princeton University Press, Roman Law
Roundtable on Caritas in Veritate
Thursday, July 9, 2009
A round up of commentary on the new encyclical was published yesterday on the Web site of Catholic World Report. CWR asked “a group of leading Catholic intellectuals to reflect on the encyclical, its place in the larger body of Catholic social teaching, and Pope Benedict’s vision of a well-ordered and just society.” Those who contributed included J. Brian Benestad, Francis J. Beckwith, Father Joseph Fessio, S.J., Richard Garnett, Thomas S. Hibbs, Paul Kengor, George Neumayr, Tracey Rowland, Father James V. Schall, and Rev. Robert A. Sirico. Here’s what Rev. Sirico had to say:
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Category: News and Events, Vatican
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Caritas in Veritate, catholic social teaching, catholic world report, pope benedict xvi, Vatican
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