Here are some book reviews of note from recent weeks that you may find to be of interest:

• Charles H. Parker. The Reformation of Community: Social Welfare and Calvinist Charity in Holland, 1572-1620. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xv + 221 pp. Illustrations, map, tables, notes, sources cited, index. $37.99 (paper), ISBN 0-521-02540-0. Reviewed by Victoria Christman, Department of History, Luther College.

• Gertrude Himmelfarb. The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006. xv + 259 pp. Notes, index. $26.00 (cloth), ISBN 1-56663-624-8; $16.95 (paper), ISBN 1-56663-722-8. Reviewed for H-Albion by Stewart Weaver, Department of History, University of Rochester.
• Norman Etherington, ed. Missions and Empire. Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. xiii + 332 pp. Notes, chapter bibliographies, index. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-19-025347-1. Reviewed for H-Albion by Jane Samson, Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta.
• Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton Economic History of the Western World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. ISBN-10: 0691121354; ISBN-13: 978-0691121352. Reviewed for the New York Times by Nicholas Wade.
• Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI). Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration. New York and London: Doubleday, 2007. xxiv + 374 pp. $24.95. ISBN 978-0-385-52341-7. Reviewed for Denver Journal by Craig Blomberg, Distinguished Professor of New Testament, Denver Seminary.
• Stephen J. Grabill, Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics. Emory University Studies in Law and Religion; Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006, x + 310. $38.00 (paperback). Reviewed for the Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary by W. Travis McMaken.
  

Readings in Social Ethics: Richard Baxter, How to Do Good to Many (London, 1682; repr. 1830), part 3 of 3. References below are to page numbers.

Concluding Consectaries:

• These consectaries are aimed at Baxter’s audience, wealthy Christian merchants. Baxter examines in some particular detail suggestions for the right use of their charitable funds and efforts: “Might not somewhat more be done than yet is, to further the gospel in your factories, and in our plantations?” (329)

• Concerning Christians abroad who are too poor to have materials printed in their own countries and languages: “Could nothing be done to get some Bibles, catechisms, and practical books printed in their own tongues, and given among them? I know there is difficulty in the way; but money, and willingness, and diligence, might do something” (330).
• Baxter addresses the institution of slavery and condemns it as Christians practice it, contravening the greater moral duty to aim towards the conversion of their slaves. The law mandate the release of slaves upon their conversion: “Is it not an odious crime of Christians to hinder the conversion of these infidels, lest they lose their service by it, and to prefer their gain before men’s souls? Is not this to sell souls for a little money, as Judas did his Lord?” (330).
• Baxter denounces such practice in no uncertain terms: “Why should these men be called Christians, or have any christian reputation, or privileges themselves, who think both Christianity and souls to be no more worth than to be thus basely sold for the gain of men’s servilest labours? And what, though the poor infidels desire not their own conversion, their need is the greater, and not the less” (331).

Next week: John Wesley, “The Rich Man and Lazarus.”

Remember – there’s really no dispute over the evidence that catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is underway. All the models predict it; the science is solid; the consensus is broad and unshakable.

Oh, and pay no attention that significant downward revisions have had to be made in recent US temperature data:

Climate scientist Michael Mann (famous for the hockey stick chart) once made the statement that the 1990′s were the warmest decade in a millennia and that “there is a 95 to 99% certainty that 1998 was the hottest year in the last one thousand years.” (By the way, Mann now denies he ever made this claim, though you can watch him say these exact words in the CBC documentary Global Warming: Doomsday Called Off).

Well, it turns out that according to the NASA GISS database that 1998 was not even the hottest year of the last century. Many temperatures from recent decades that appeared to show substantial warming have been revised downwards.

A good deal of interesting information in that post – read the whole thing. Via Q and O.

Lately, I’ve heard one too many emo kids misread T.S. Eliot as being one of their own. In Russell Kirk’s words, it is easy for the “rootless and aimless” of the new generation to over-identify with Eliot, seeing him as a spokesman “for the futility and fatuity of the modern era, all whimper and no bang — a kind of Anglo-American ritualistic nihilism.” And whining, pining, Anglo-American ritualistic nihilism is the cultural trend of the day, whether you look at the musically and lyrically directionless music that tops current charts, the shapelessness and androgyny seeping into high fashion, or the melodramatic and attention-seeking ways teenagers and college students spend their social time (not the least of which takes place on the Internet, through personal blogs, Facebook, and chatting).

Vindicating Eliot won’t restore the Waste Land to health or happiness, but it’s important to wrest him from the claws of both actual and perpetual adolescents who would make him a posterboy for their own disillusionment. As Kirk says, Eliot wanted to expose the soulish devastation modern life creates, but also to “show the way back to permanent things.” Speaking of The Waste Land, Eliot himself wrote, “I may have expressed for [approving critics] their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention.” Careful readers of Eliot will realize that he railed against exactly the kinds of things that misguided existentialist or socialist types promote, such as in this passage from Murder in the Cathedral:

Those who put their faith in worldly order
Not controlled by the order of God,
In confident ignorance, but arrest disorder
Make it fast, breed fatal disease,
Degrade what they exalt.

While I was in seminary in Kentucky, students were required to complete a relatively extensive service project that assisted and helped the poor and marginalized in our community. My group volunteered at a teen pregnancy center, others at nursing homes, or with organizations like Habitat for Humanity. At the pregnancy center we led job training, financial classes, and other practical skills for work and the home. A different group went another direction, they passed out petitions that called upon the federal government to do more for the less fortunate.

Ryan Messmore of the Heritage Foundation, notes the obvious today when he says, “When people need assistance, therefore, the first place many think to turn is Washington D.C.” In a piece titled “My Neighbor’s Keeper?” for FrontPage magazine, Messmore lifts up the moral responsibilities we have to assist and help those among us. Messmore’s piece also strongly argues that a “hyper – individualistic” view actually leads to a more powerful and centralized government. Provided below are some common sense and convicting words from his article:

It would be a detriment to our sense of mutual responsibility for one another if the contin­ued recourse to federal programs for remedies caused Americans to view their tax payments — which fund government social service programs — as their contribution to helping people in need. Even the knowledge that such federal programs exist, regardless of their actual effectiveness, may cause some to conclude that the ball is in some­body else’s court.

One of the reasons government is thought to have so much responsibility for the well-being of citizens is that, in modern Western culture, people are viewed more in terms of their isolated autonomy than in terms of their social relationships. In other words, we are prone to think of human beings as self-standing individuals rather than as persons-in-community.

Mutual responsibility is essential within a healthy society, especially a free, democratic one. The more people feel that they can trust and rely upon each other, the less they will need to turn to government for care — or to remedy injustice.

Government does not have a monopoly on responsibility for meeting people’s needs. However, government has increasingly become the primary default setting when discussion turns to who is obligated to care for others. The result is less per­sonal and efficient care for individuals and a weak­ening of our social fabric of responsibility and sense of moral obligation to one another through a vari­ety of relationships.

For me, perfect relationship and love is modeled in the Triune character and nature of God. God’s perfect love and transforming grace is also how we should try to love and care for others. The disengagement from so much of our society from helping and serving others is not a headline grabber, but it’s a crisis of the heart and soul. Christ himself said, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”

Readings in Social Ethics: Richard Baxter, How to Do Good to Many (London, 1682; repr. 1830), part 2 of 3. References below are to page numbers.

On Motives:

• Human works are God’s appointed means of grace: “It is God’s great mercy to mankind, that he will use us all in doing good to one another; and it is a great part of his wise government of the world, that in societies men should be tied to it by the sense of every particular man’s necessity; and it is a great honour to those that he maketh his almoners, or servants, to convey his gifts to others; God bids you give nothing but what is his, and no otherwise your own but as his stewards. It is his bounty, and your service or stewardship, which is to be exercised” (320).

• An element of self-love can be present as a motivation. There is an Augustinian tone to this note, that all men by nature seek what they perceive as the good: “Self-love, therefore, should persuade men to do good to all. You are not the least gainers by it yourselves…. The believing giver hath more pleasure than the receiver; and this without any conceit of commutative meriting of God, or any false trust to works for justification” (321).
• There is no time like the present to do good works: “And let all men take their common and special opportunities to do good: time will not stay; yourselves, your wives, your children, your servants, your neighbours, are posting to another world; speak now what you would have them hear; do them now all the good you can. It must be now or never; there is no returning from the dead to warn them” (323-34).

Remember the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia and Sri Lanka? I distinctly remember people making jokes about how they’d find a way to blame the whole catastrophe on global warming. Note to self: climate change hype is beyond parody:

Unlike most apparently intractable problems, which have a tendency to go away when examined closely and analytically, the climate change predicament just seems to get bigger and scarier the more we learn about it.

Now we discover that not only are the oceans and the atmosphere conspiring against us, bringing baking temperatures, more powerful storms, floods and ever-climbing sea levels, but the crust beneath our feet seems likely to join in too.

Looking back to other periods in our planet’s history when the climate was swinging about wildly, most notably during the last ice age, it appears that far more than the weather was affected. The solid earth also became restless, with an increase in volcanic activity, earthquakes, giant submarine landslides and tsunamis. At the rate climate change is accelerating, there is every prospect that we will see a similar response from the planet, heralding not just a warmer future but also a fiery one.

Note that the title of this article is “The Earth Fights Back.” That’s right – humanity is about to get punched in the face by an enraged anthropomorphic planet that spits fire and crumbles beneath our feet out of spite.

Gaia is NOT PLEASED. Not one bit.

Now that we’ve heard from the panic button crowd, allow me to serve up a nice shot of anti-panic from your friend and mine, Michael Crichton:

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

And furthermore, the consensus of scientists has frequently been wrong. As they were wrong when they believed, earlier in my lifetime, that the continents did not move. So we must remember the immortal words of Mark Twain, who said, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

That link is worth a read in full, if only to enjoy the cool, calming effects of reasonable discourse.

UPDATE: It turns out that Jay Richards commented on this article as well over at Planet Gore…

The Washington Times reviews Acton’s Call of the Entrepreneur today in an article titled “Capitalist Calling”:

The Acton Institute hopes the documentary will crush the popular myth of business as a “zero-sum game.”

Jay Richards, the director of Acton Media, told an audience at a Heritage Foundation screening that the “point is that human beings create wealth; it’s not a zero-sum game.”

The film addresses the critics of capitalism while acknowledging that capitalism’s defenders are sometimes too theoretical. “The Call of the Entrepreneur” discusses aspects of entrepreneurship in “moral” terms seldom used by libertarians.

“We consider ‘God’ a public word,” Mr. Richards said.

Read the entire review.

A new film titled “Things of the Spirit,” takes a fresh look at the life and presidency of Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge, understandably, received renewed interest during the Reagan era of American politics. Coolidge is perhaps best known for his laissez-faire economic policies and the famed moniker, “Silent Cal.” What makes “Things of the Spirit” different is that it’s produced by a self avowed “liberal filmmaker,” John Karol.

Karol penned a piece last week for the New York Sun titled, “The Case for Cal.” When he first set out to tackle Coolidge years ago he admitted to not knowing all that much about his subject. “What little I knew of Coolidge came from New Deal historians who view him as a somnambulant capitalist tool whose presidency served only as a prelude to disaster,” Karol said. Here are some fascinating observations from his article, which puts Coolidge in a new light:

– If I had to fashion a sound bite to describe him, I would call Coolidge a political minimalist who chose to guide rather than legislate.

– It is on economic matters that Coolidge is most remembered. World War I and its aftermath caused skyrocketing national debt. At the same time, the top income tax rate soared to 73%, stifling private investment. Post-war America was a chaos of strikes, race riots, anarchist bombings, inflation, and unemployment.

– Harding, Coolidge, and Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon sought to kick-start the economy by reducing the top marginal tax rate to 25%. They did. Revenues increased dramatically, presaging Arthur Laffer by half a century. Both presidents ran surpluses in all their annual budgets. By the time Coolidge left office, the national debt had been cut by one-third.

– New Deal historians maintain that the tax cuts of the 1920s reversed the progressive tax policies of Woodrow Wilson. Far from it. Exemptions increased so much that by 1927 almost 98% of the American people paid no income tax whatsoever. When Coolidge left office in 1929, wealthy people paid 93% of the tax load. During Wilson’s last year in office they had paid only 59%.

– Less remembered, and less appreciated by contemporary politicians, was Coolidge’s aversion to farm subsidies. At great political risk, Coolidge twice vetoed the popular McNary-Haugen farm subsidy bill.

Karol also makes note of Coolidge’s aggressive actions in cleaning up the scandals from Harding’s administration, and his very progressive views on race for his time. Coolidge was known as a man of immense integrity. He even cut the name tags out of his suits when he asked his wife to resale them, so not to profit from his name and position.

On the film’s website, columnist and radio talk show host Michael Medved, calls “Things of the Spirit,” the finest documentary he has ever seen. George Gilder notes, “The film completely dispels the cliché notion of New Deal historians that Coolidge was a small-minded materialist “Babbitt” whose Presidency served only as a prelude to disaster. See it. You’ll never think the same way about Calvin Coolidge again.” Former Democratic Presidential nominee Michael Dukakis also weighs in with a glowing review.

Calvin Coolidge in many ways represents the old fashioned idealism of a largely forgotten generation of common sense and practicality. In a sound clip provided by Michigan State University from 1920, Coolidge warns the country about the dangers of excessive taxation and federal spending. This high quality recording is worth a listen.

Other memorable statements from Coolidge:

– I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the Government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its most practical form.

– The strength of our country is the strength of its religious convictions.

– If only his countrymen would fulfill their basic obligations to one another, most of their problems would take care of themselves.

The theme for Coolidge’s presidential reelection in 1924 was, “Keep Cool with Coolidge.” Today that would sound like a presidential campaign slogan under a global warming platform. Perhaps as the government becomes more regulatory and intrusive, and far less practical, the lessons of Keeping cool with Coolidge will echo louder still.

Today marks the day that the Acton Institute broadens its horizons… If you haven’t noticed, we’ve literally widened our blog to 900px, creating a bit more space for all the things we have to say. We’ve also changed the location of the blog to http://blog.acton.org/. All of our old links (http://www.acton.org/blog/…) should still work although there may be occasions when they won’t. Please don’t hesitate to leave notification of old links that don’t work in the comments section of this post.Technorati Profile

You may also want to update your RSS feeds, although the old ones should still work. The general PowerBlog RSS feed is now http://blog.acton.org/feeds/index.rss2. Another nifty feature that we’re adding is the ability to grab an RSS feed of a particular author. So, if you just can’t get enough of Marc’s “Global Warming Consensus Alerts,” scroll down till you find the “Authors” box on the lefthand column of the page and click on the XML icon next to Marc’s name.