Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'abraham kuyper'

October 28, 2013

What the Poor Need Most

During the late 1970s and early 1980s I spent two extended periods living below the poverty line. The first experience came as I entered the first grade. My father was a chronically unhappy man who was skillful and ambitious, yet prone to wanderlust. Continue Reading...
August 29, 2013

Kuyper for the 21st Century: Calvin College to Celebrate New Biography

James D. Bratt recently released Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat, the first full-scale English-language biography of the influential Dutch theologian, minister, politician, newspaper editor, etc. The book has spurred plenty of discussion across the web, and now, Calvin College is hosting a special event to celebrate its publication. Continue Reading...
July 17, 2013

John Calvin on civil government

Though primarily a theologian, the famous Reformation figure John Calvin had much to say about the application of biblical principles to politics. His focus on the sovereignty of God in all aspects of Creation led Calvin to believe in God’s ordinance not only in the spiritual realm, but also in civil government. Continue Reading...
July 16, 2013

The Roots of Enduring Cultural Change

Over at Christianity Today, Andy Crouch confronts modern society’s increasing skepticism toward institutional structures, arguing that without them, all of our striving toward cultural transformation is bound to falter: For cultural change to grow and persist, it has to be institutionalized, meaning it must become part of the fabric of human life through a set of learnable and repeatable patterns. Continue Reading...
June 14, 2013

I Pity The Fool Who Doesn’t Shop the Acton Audio Fire Sale

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! Continue Reading...
June 12, 2013

Art and the Common Good

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. Continue Reading...
June 03, 2013

Don Draper Meets Abraham Kuyper

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.” Continue Reading...
May 29, 2013

Abraham Kuyper as a Third-Way Thinker

The Calvinist International recently interviewed Allan Carlson, author of Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies – And Why They Disappeared Could you tell us a bit about your view of how the Dutch polymath Abraham Kuyper influences your project? Continue Reading...
April 22, 2013

Christian Scholarship and the Crisis of the University

This past weekend, I had the privilege to attend and present a paper at the 2013 Kuyper Center for Public Theology conference at Princeton Seminary. The conference was on the subject of “Church and Academy” and focused not only on the relationship between the institutions of the Church and the university, but also on questions such as whether theology still has a place in the academy and what place that might be. Continue Reading...