Today marks the official launch of the new and improved website for the Journal of Markets & Morality.

In addition to the new design, we also have included a search feature whereby anyone who wants can search back issues for keywords, authors, names, and so on. For example, a search for “Alexis de Tocqueville” yields 29 results, and a search for “subsidiarity” turns up 78! As is our current policy, everything up to the two most recent issues is free to access for the public and all issues are open to subscribers.

Read more on New Journal of Markets & Morality Website…

In this week’s Acton Commentary, “Contagious Community,” I look at the positive as well as the negative aspects of coordination and cooperation between human beings on a global scale. The film Contagion provided the occasion for these reflections, and I argue that

Read more on Acton Commentary: Contagious Community…

Fr. Robert Sirico, President and Co-founder of the Acton Insitute, has a busy media schedule to promote his new book, Defending the Free Market: the Moral Case for a Free Economy. Here are just a few that you might want to catch:

Read more on Media Events for “Defending the Free Market”…

Beginning today, the conference “Religion and Liberty — A Match Made in Heaven?” gets underway in Jerusalem. Sponsored by the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies (JIMS), the Acton Institute and others, the event asks questions such as, “Is capitalism not only efficient but also moral?” In conjunction with this May 20-24 conference, Acton is offering its two Jewish monographs through Amazon Kindle at no charge.

Read more on Free Acton Institute eBooks on Judaism, Law and the Market Economy (May 20-24)…

As part of his final address to the participants in the law and religion symposium last week, Rik Torfs, a Belgian senator and head of the faculty of canon law at KU Leuven, observed that some of the great things in public discourse occur in the context of vociferous initial backlash. After all, he said, if you posit something and everyone just accepts it as a matter of course, then it is merely a truism and of no benefit to anyone. You haven’t really said anything at all.

Read more on A Minority Part of the Conversation…

Acton Institute is once again offering a free ebook; this time, Banking, Justice and the Common Good. From now until May 5, 2012 at 3 a.m. EST, you can click on this link and download the monograph for free.

Read more on Free ebook: Banking, Justice and the Common Good…

Is ‘fair trade’ more fair or more just than free trade? While free trade has been increasingly maligned, The Fair Trade movement has become increasingly popular over the last several years. Many see this movement as a way to help people in the developing world and as a more just alternative to free trade. On the other hand, others argue that fair trade creates an unfair advantage that tends to harm the poor.
Read more on Fair Trade or Free Trade?…

On of Chuck Colson’s heroes was Abraham Kuyper, and when we set out to publish a translation of Kuyper’s three volumes on the topic of common grace, Chuck was happy to support the project.

Here’s what he said about the first selection from the larger translation project, Wisdom & Wonder: Common Grace in Science & Art:

Abraham Kuyper was a profound theologian, an encyclopedic thinker, and a deeply spiritual man who believed that it is the believer’s task ‘to know God in all his works.’ In a day when secular science is seeking to establish hegemony over all knowing, and when postmodern art is threatening to bring an end to art, Kuyper’s solid, Biblical insights can help to restore perspective and sanity to these two critical areas of creation.

Read more on Colson on Common Grace…

Shrine with relic of St. Dimitry of Rostov in Spaso-Yakovlevsky abbey in Rostov. Source: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress). Wikimedia Commons.

Yesterday in First Things’ daily “On the Square” column, Matthew Cantirino highlighted Sergius Bulgakov’s theology of relics, recently translated by Boris Jakim.

Cantirino writes,

Even today, it must be admitted, the subject of relics is an often-overlooked one in theology, and especially in popular apologetics. To the minds of many the topic remains a curio—a mild embarrassment better left to old ladies’ devotionals, or the pages of Chaucer. Yet, for Bulgakov, this awkward intrusion of the physical is precisely what religion needs in modernity…. As he sees it, all relics take part in (and, in some sense, become) aspects [of] the greatest of all “relics,” the bread of the Eucharist. And it is for this reason, he notes, that altars include… relics at their core. Like the Eucharist, saints’ relics “are not corpses; rather, they are bodies of resurrection; and saints do not die.”

Read more on Sergius Bulgakov’s “Religious Materialism” and Spiritual Hope…

Since your wallets are probably a bit lighter due to Tax Day here in the United States, Acton wants to help out by giving you a free e-book: Globalization, Poverty and International Development. Just follow the link, Globalization, to get our monograph from Lord Brian Griffiths delivered free to your Kindle or e-reader. This offer is available beginning at 3 a.m. EST, 4/17/12 until 3 a.m. EST, 4/19/12.

Read more on For the tax-weary: a free e-book from Acton!…