Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'parables'

Mary’s Son, the Genius

It’s wrong to reduce Jesus to a moral teacher or mere philosopher. Jesus was not a wordsmith selling word salads, nor a crank peddling new ideas, nor a sophist showing off his rhetorical verve, nor an intellectual establishing his own academy à la Plato. Continue Reading...

Surrendered Unto Stewardship: Darrell Bock On Money That Matters

What is the purpose of money? Is it for our survival? For our status, significance, or success? Is it for the service of ourselves or for the service of others? In a talk for the Oikonomia Network, theologian Darrell Bock sets out to answer the question, drawing from the numerous treatments of money in the book of Luke — from the rich fool and Lazarus’ wealthy neighbor to Zacchaeus and the widow’s mite. Continue Reading...

Review: Hope for the Workplace, Christ in You

Bill Dalgetty’s Hope for the Workplace, Christ in You is rich with stories of people in business who are struggling to integrate their faith and work lives. Weaving biblical parables with dozens of real life stories gleaned from his experience as president of Christians in Commerce International, Dalgetty points—usually explicitly and sometimes in a more nuanced way—to universal truths of human conscience. Continue Reading...

How a Study on Hurricanes Proved Bastiat’s Broken Window Fallacy

After 6,712 cyclones, typhoons, and hurricanes the evidence is clear: Bastiat was right all along. In 1850, the economic journalist Frédéric Bastiat introduced the parable of the broken window to illustrate why destruction, and the money spent to recover from destruction, is not actually a net benefit to society (see the video at the end of this post for an explanation of the broken window fallacy). Continue Reading...

The Godly Stewardship of Money

I certainly like where Dr. Calder ends up, but I’m not quite so sure about the argumentation he uses to get there. This short video is worth checking out: “Breaking the Power of Money” (HT: ESN blog). Continue Reading...

Jesus and the Parables

By happy serendipity two books of related interest caught my attention today. The first is David Cowan’s Economic Parables: The Monetary Teachings of Jesus Christ (Paternoster, 2007). Michael Kruse recommends the book in a brief review. Continue Reading...