Say, did you hear about the big Acton University Audio Fire Sale that’s going on now in the Acton Institute’s Digital Downloads Store? 68 presentations from Acton University 2012 have been marked down a full seventy-five percent, giving you access to an amazing range of talks on topics ranging from Christian Anthropology to Corruption, from Abraham Kuyper to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, from Biblical Foundations of Freedom to Tensions in Modern Conservatism, all for just fifty cents per lecture!

Read more on I Pity The Fool Who Doesn’t Shop the Acton Audio Fire Sale…

1. There are almost 2 million single dads raising kids in the U.S.
2. About 24 million children do not live with their biological father.
3. In 1965, dads spent about 2 1/2 hours a day with their child; today, dads spend about 6 1/2 hours with their child daily.

Read more on 5 Facts About Fatherhood In The United States For Father’s Day…

Reformed theologian Abraham Kuyper, in his work Wisdom & Wonder, explores humanity’s relationship to creativity:

Whereas idol worship leads away from the spiritual, obscures the spiritual, and drives it into the background, symbolic worship by contrast possesses the capacity, by repeatedly connecting the visible symbol with the spiritual, to direct a people still dependent on the sensuous toward the spiritual and to nurture that people unto the spiritual.

Art should lead us to look beyond the created object, the artist and into a contemplation of the Creator God, from whom all creativity flows. Art should be celebrated, because it truly is a gift from God. Read more on Art and the Common Good…

The Dark Ages: that time when people knew the Earth was flat, the civilization of the Western Roman Empire had collapsed, and people basically sat around waiting for something – anything – good to happen.

Read more on The Dark Ages – Not So Dark, Really…

Russell Moore on how Abraham Kuyper predicted the era of Madison Avenue’s culture of art and mammon:

[James Bratt] writes that Kuyper saw the dangerous combination of “Art as captured by Mammon.” Here the two combined to a “commercialized, lowered, prostituted, feeding the mass compulsion for excitement, excess, and the erotic.” In this, Bratt contends that Kuyper was hitting close to explaining the contemporary rise of Madison Avenue as a cultural force, “the marriage of Art and Mammon that is commercial advertising.”

Read more on Don Draper Meets Abraham Kuyper…

While enjoying time off this weekend, why not take some time to learn more about America’s military sacrifice in defense of liberty? Many of the best books I’ve ever read have been about American military history. When I worked for former Congressman Gene Taylor in Gulfport, Miss. one of my favorite parts of my job while working constituent services for veterans was listening to stories about battles from places like Okinawa, Khe Sanh, and Hue City. I’ve read all of the books compiled below and all of them tell magnificent stories of virtue, honor, sacrifice, and leadership. Obviously this is not a comprehensive list but I worked at including different conflicts and service branches. While I could expand it, I’m asking readers to add your own recommendations in the comment section.

Read more on 7 Great Books for Memorial Day…

My persuasion can build a nation
Endless power
With our love we can devour
You’ll do anything for me

-Beyonce, “Run the World (Girls)”

That’s the apparent fantasy of Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky of Illinois. She recently hosted her annual fundraising luncheon, with guest speaker, Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards. Schakowsky said, “humanity is at a crossroads on this small planet and that our survival as a species is dependent on women taking charge, taking the world in our own hands.”

Read more on If Only Women Ran The World…….

There are arguably two forces that may be destroying the ethics of journalism today. The first is the competition for rankings and advertising that drives the obsession to report something “first” in a 24-hour news cycle. The second is that social media exacerbates the first. These two forces make journalists vulnerable to poor, unethical reporting. We are seeing this play out in what could easily be considered unethical coverage of the tragedy in Boston by CNN and other news platforms.

On Wednesday CNN’s John King reported from law enforcement “sources” that the suspect was a dark-skinned male.
Read more on Journalists Bearing False Witness in Boston…

Nobody can know everything about everything, but in the age of the internet, fact-checking isn’t too tough. It’s one thing for a high-school student to attempt to slide by on “facts” in a research paper for sophomore social studies, but another when professional journalists make errors about easily investigated pieces of knowledge.

Read more on Does the Media Need to Be Schooled in Religion?…

Every day we hear about contemporary, serious concepts (e.g., chained CPI) and new, silly fads (Vadering), but in the modern age it’s not always easy to tell which category a new idea falls into. Take, for instance, Bitcoin. As Jordan Ballor wrote yesterday,

It is certainly a phenomenon worth greater attention, and something of significant cultural, social and economic import. But I’m not buying Bitcoin, at least not yet.

My initial skepticism is in part due to my lack of familiarity with the details of the currency and its formation. I certainly need to learn more.

Many of us are in the same situation as Jordan. We recognize that Bitcoin is a significant phenomenon but need to become more familiar in order to develop an informed opinion and be able to “think Christianly” about it’s value and implications. While Bitcoin is not a topic every Christian should know something about (at least not yet), it does overlap with many subject areas of particular interest for Acton PowerBlog readers: business, technology, regulation, ethics, etc. For that reason, I thought it might be helpful to write a series on Bitcoin for Christians.

Over a series of three posts I’ll provide some background information on Bitcoin, explain how it works, and consider some of the reasons why Christians need to develop an informed opinion about the cryptocurrency. The purpose of these posts is not to tell you what to think about Bitcoin (though I have begun to form my own opinion) but merely to provide information that will help you to develop an informed opinion of your own.

We should start with the question “What is Bitcoin?” but before we can answer that we need to consider a more fundamental question, “What is money?” And that question brings us to the story of the rai of Yap.

What Yap Can Teach Us About Bitcoin
Read more on What Christians Should Know About Bitcoin (Part 1 of 3)…