Christian reviewers take the new take on the Man of Steel many different ways:
Steven Greydanus likes it.
Thomas Hibbs doesn’t.
Keith Howland likes it.
Peter Chattaway doesn’t (very much).
None of these has anything on Acton’s own Jordan Ballor, however, who analyzes the film with penetrating insight (or X-ray vision, as one is tempted to say…).
The clash between scientists and moralists that Jordan highlights below is displayed also in reaction to the recent comments by Cardinal Alfonso Trujillo of the Pontifical Council for the Family concerning excommunication of those involved in embryonic stem cell research.
In Part 1, we saw that the infrastructure of Protestant social teaching is not nearly as sophisticated as Roman Catholic social teaching and that natural law has often been viewed as a bridge between the church and the world.
Ron Sider, The Scandal Of The Evangelical Conscience: Why Are Christians Living Just Like The Rest Of The World? (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2005), 144 pp.
“Summing Up Sider’s Legacy”
Ron Sider’s recent book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, is a noteworthy achievement. One the one hand, it represents an almost complete shift away from left-leaning government-oriented solutions to social and economic problems that characterize the first edition of his popular Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. This movement had already become apparent by the time Sider released the twentieth anniversary edition of Rich Christians, in which he embraced increased access to markets and capital investment as necessary components of solutions to global poverty. In Scandal, Sider explicitly acknowledges this perspective, as he writes of “the stunning success of market economies in producing ever-greater material abundance.”
Sider is thus able to recognize the basic goodness of creation: “Historic Christianity has been profoundly materialistic. The created world is good. God wants us to create wealth and delight in the bounty of the material world.” A key part of Sider’s project is to properly and relatively value the material and temporal in light of the spiritual and eternal. Thus he rightly notes that “historic Christianity also placed firm boundaries on this materialism. Nothing, not even the whole material world, matters as much as one’s relationship with God.” Read more on Book Review: The Scandal Of The Evangelical Conscience…
This from the official Google blog: “We’ve always recognized the importance of copyright, because we believe that authors and publishers deserve to be rewarded for their creative endeavors. And we specifically designed Google Book Search to respect copyright law – never showing more than two or three snippets around a search term without the publisher’s prior permission, which they can give through our Partner Program.”
Read more on Google Books: ‘Authors and publishers deserve to be rewarded’…
The newest edition of the Journal of Markets & Morality is now available online to subscribers (the print version should be along shortly). The newest issue features a “symposium” in which several authors discuss the “Dynamics of Faith-Based Policy Initiatives” (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4).
Read more on Journal of Markets & Morality, Volume 9, Issue 1…
David VanDrunen’s new monograph, A Biblical Case for Natural Law, is a must read for Christians who are perplexed about the biblical standing of natural law. It makes a biblical case for the existence and practical importance of natural law.
A host of Christian and secular commentators have trumpeted the similarities between Superman and Jesus Christ in light of the forthcoming movie, Superman Returns.
Many Christians embraced the Superman hero when a trailer for the new movie was released using the words of Superman’s father Jor-El, voiced by Marlon Brando: “Even though you’ve been raised as a human being you’re not one of them. They can be a great people, Kal-El. They wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I sent them you… my only son.”
Read more on Anti-Christ Superman: The Superhero and the Suffering Servant…
An article in today’s New York Times, “Push for New Tactics as War on Malaria Falters,” coincides nicely with Acton’s newest ad campaign (see the back cover of the July 1 issue of World). The article attacks government mismanagement of allocated funds in the global fight against malaria. Celia Dugger, the author, writes:
