Acton Institute Powerblog

Promoting free societies characterized by liberty & religious principles

Search results for "index.html"
February 22, 2006

Christianity and civilization

Today’s BreakPoint commentary by Chuck Colson gives a brief review and survey of Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason. Concludes Colson: “This book will you give you some very good ammunition to answer those critics who come up with the same tired, old arguments about the fact that Christianity held back the progress of civilization. Continue Reading...
February 17, 2006

Fumbling with fundamentalism

One of the religion beat’s favorite canards is to implicitly equate what it calls American Christian “fundamentalism” with what it calls Muslim or Islamic “fundamentalism.” After all, both are simply species of the genus. Continue Reading...
February 14, 2006

Bonhoeffer’s legacy

Earlier this month, we marked the 100th anniversary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s birth on February 4, in what is now Wroclaw, Poland. In a message before the International Bonhoeffer Conference on February 3, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a man immersed in a specific cultural heritage, and untroubled by the fact; he was a person of profound and rigorous (and very traditional) personal spirituality; he was someone committed to the ecumenical perspective from very early on in his adult life. Continue Reading...
February 13, 2006

‘Captialism’ according to the academy

For a quick overview of the current state of appreciation for economics and capitalism among various ‘academics,’ see the newly inaugurated e-journal Fast Capitalism. It might as well be subtitled: Marxism, Alive and Well. Continue Reading...
February 09, 2006

‘With God’s help, we can stop global warming’

A few others have addressed this issue in previous posts, but I wanted to jump in with my two cents. Yesterday’s New York Times notes that a group of evangelical leaders have entered the debate over climate change: Despite opposition from some of their colleagues, 86 evangelical Christian leaders have decided to back a major initiative to fight global warming, saying “millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors.” Continue Reading...
February 09, 2006

Who argues that the environment doesn’t matter?

The Chicago Tribune has a story about the Evangelical Climate Initiative (ECI) launched February 8th. (See my initial response here.) Most reports of this story have been somewhat fair. But the Chicago Tribune story takes an unjustified swipe at evangelicals who disagree with the ECI statement. Continue Reading...
February 08, 2006

A love/hate relationship with science

One aspect of the evangelical involvement in debates over global warming and climate change that has intriqued me has been what I deem to be a rather large blind spot about the relation of religious conservatives to science. Continue Reading...
February 08, 2006

The state of American science and culture, cont’d.

Following Michael Miller’s recent Acton Commentary, “Why Johnny Can’t Compete with Sanjay”, and the resulting comments, two of America’s best political commentators have also weighed in on the subject. First there’s Charles Krauthammer’s Time article, arguing that America is doing fine, partly as a result of less dependence on government-funded research. Continue Reading...
February 03, 2006

The rest of the story

More from the State of the Union: “…the number of children born to teenage mothers has been falling for a dozen years in a row.” That’s a good thing. But there’s still a marriage crisis, and part of it is related to birth rates among unmarried women: Births to unmarried mothers reached a record high of almost 1.5 million and made up 35.7% of all births in 2004. Continue Reading...
January 31, 2006

Created imago Dei

Winners of the 2005 Acton Essay Competition have been announced. The topic for the 15th annual competition: The human person, by virtue of being created imago Dei, is an independent being, individually unique, rational, the subject of moral agency, a co-creator, and inherently social. Continue Reading...