Means of common grace

In this week’s Acton Commentary, we take a short excerpt from the latest volume in the Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology, the second volume of the trilogy on common grace. Continue Reading...

New Issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality (Vol. 21, No. 1)

The newest issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality has been published online and print copies are forthcoming. This issue is a theme issue on “The Role of Religion in a Free Society,” with guest editors Richard Epstein and Mario Rizzo of New York University School of Law, and Michael McConnell of Stanford Law School. Continue Reading...

Mini-Review: Advice to a Desolate France

Gene Fant, president of North Greenville University, recently attended Acton University as a presidential fellow. He, like many of us, has a bunch of summer reading lined up, and this includes the short treatise from the sixteenth century, Advice to a Desolate France, by Sebastian Castellio. Continue Reading...

Kuyper Conference: Faith, Freedom and Education

Last month the Acton Institute co-sponsored the 2018 Kuyper Conference hosted by Calvin College & Seminary. Acton’s support of the conference included the organization of a panel discussion on “Faith, Freedom, and Education,” which featured Harry Van Dyke of Redeemer University College, Charles L. Continue Reading...

How not to think clearly on faith and economics

Mark Labberton, President of Fuller Seminary, recently addressed a meeting of Evangelical leaders held at Wheaton College and has released a reconstruction of his remarks. It is an interesting address which spends four paragraphs explicitly addressing questions of economics and economic policy. Continue Reading...

Is economics an ideology?

Richard H. Spady, research professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins, has recently published a piece at First Things entitled ‘Economics as Ideology’ in which he explores some contemporary trends among economists and their use of economics as a Procrustean bed to reshape society in its own image, A body of thought is “ideological” when it will­fully projects its own first principles on its subject matter and actively seeks, perhaps unconsciously, material changes to bring social realities into conformity with these first principles. Continue Reading...

The bishop, Balaam, and communism

Lester DeKoster begins his book Communism and Christian Faith, now out in a new edition from Christian’s Library Press, with a quote from Bishop Joseph Butler’s sermon ‘Upon the Character of Balaam’: “Things and actions are what they are, and their consequences will be what they will be: why then should we seek to be deceived?” Continue Reading...