In the latest issue of Religion & Liberty, Acton Institute executive direct Kris Mauren answers the question, “Why does the Acton Institute publish the Journal of Markets & Morality?”
For more, check out my interview with Micheal Hickerson of the Emerging Scholars Network.
In an article appearing in the American Spectator, Samuel Gregg discusses the growth of religion in China, its system of crony capitalism, and its need to accept freedom. Opening the column, Gregg describes how the Catholic Church’s freedom from state control in China is at stake. Gregg later explains that there isn’t just corruption in China’s crony system of capitalism, but also in its society:
Earlier this year I was invited to participate in a seminar sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies and Students for a Free Economy at Northwood University. In the course of the weekend I was able to establish that while I wasn’t the first theologian to present at an IHS event, I may well have been the first Protestant theologian.
Read more on On the Relationship between Religion and Liberty…
photo reprinted with permission from warofourfathers.com
The emotional scars and nightmares from Eugene Bondurant Sledge’s memories of the battles at Peleliu and Okinawa haunted him for years. He was among a company of men who didn’t talk about their feelings. The experience, he said, “made savages of us all.” Many years later, from notes taken of the battles in his field Bible, Sledge published With The Old Breed, one of the most stirring personal accounts of war I’ve ever read.
Today is the 235th birthday of the United States Marine Corps. The PowerBlog has some excellent tributes to the Marines in the archives. They are certainly appropriate to highlight today:
Another election has come and gone, and once again the balance of power has significantly shifted in Washington, D.C. and statehouses across America. Tuesday’s results are, I suppose, a win for fans of limited government, in that a Republican House of Representatives will make it more difficult for President Obama and his Democrat colleagues in the Congress to enact more of what has been a very statist agenda. But even with the prospect of divided government on the horizon, we who believe in individual liberty and the principles of classical liberalism still have much to be concerned with. Perhaps the primary concern is whether or not those Republicans who were swept into office—not due to any real love of the electorate for the Republican Party, but rather due to anxiety over the direction the Democrats have taken the country—will be able to hold to the principles of limited government and individual liberty that so many of them claimed to espouse during the campaign, or whether those principles will be abandoned in a mad pursuit of power. Forefront in the mind of every lover of liberty should be Lord Acton’s famous maxim: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Read more on Video: Sirico on Christian Anthropology (and some thoughts on Election 2010)…
Last week Ray Nothstine and I hosted an Acton on Tap focused on the topic, “Putting Politics in its Place.” For those not able to join us at Derby Station here in Grand Rapids, I’m passing along this essay based on my comments. You can find Ray’s comments here.
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“Three Questions for Putting Politics in its Place”
In my attempt to articulate a way to put politics in its proper place I want to pursue three interrelated questions. First, I’m going to ask and answer, “What is politics supposed to do?” Second, I’m going to ask and answer, “What does politics do today?” And finally in light of those two concerns I’m going to ask and give some tentative answers for the question, “What should we do as Christians?”
Read more on Three Questions for Putting Politics in its Place…
Acton podcast host Marc Vander Maas was joined by John Pinheiro, Jordan Ballor, and myself to discuss the issue of American Exceptionalism. Click on the link below to listen:
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
Whittaker Chambers began Witness, the classic account of his time in the American Communist underground, with the declaration: “In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return.” The line was most of all a deep recognition of the power of God to redeem what was once dead. Witness was a landmark account of the evils of Communism but most importantly a description of the bankruptcy of freedom outside of the sacred. “For Chambers, God was always the prime mover in the war between Communism and freedom. If God exists then Communism cannot,” says Richard Reinsch II. And it is Reinsch who reintroduces us to Chambers, the brilliant intellectual, anti-communist, and man of faith in Whittaker Chambers: The Spirit of a Counterrevolutionary.
On his website, David Bahnsen reviews The Battle: How the Fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future by Arthur C. Brooks:
The strongest points of the book, and the reason Brooks has done such critically important work here (World magazine has already recognized the book as its Book of 2010, by the way) are found in these two areas:
