Galatians 2:10 reads, “All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I had been eager to do all along.” This is the conclusion to the Jerusalem Council, in which Paul and the leaders in Jerusalem are reconciled and unified, and where is decided that Paul and Barnabas “should go to the Gentiles, and they [James, Peter, and John] to the circumcised” (v. 9).

Read more on The Temptations of Poverty…

I’m preparing to travel to Minneapolis later this week to present a paper at the annual conference of the Sixteenth Century Society, which is a major academic society focusing on the study of the early modern period.

I’ll attempt to blog from the conference as I have opportunity and there is information of relevant interest to the PowerBlog audience. Posted after the jump is my tentative schedule, including which sessions I’ll be attending (full conference program is in PDF form here). These reflect my own scholarly interests as well as those that mesh with the focus of the Acton Institute and the Journal of Markets & Morality. My paper will be presented in the last group of sessions late Sunday morning, and is titled, “Wolfgang Musculus and the General Covenant.”

Musculus was a second generation Protestant reformer and a contemporary of John Calvin. His doctrine of the covenant is related to later developments of covenantal theology (which has important implications for political and moral thought in the post-Reformation period). Read more on Sixteenth Century Society 2007…

In Part 4, we saw that post-Enlightenment philosophical currents such as Humean empiricism, utilitarianism, and legal positivism are the real culprits in the demise of natural law and not theological criticism from within Reformation theology, as many today take for granted. If this is so, why is contemporary Protestant theology so critical of natural law?

Read more on Protestants and Natural Law, Part 5…