The 2015 Acton Lecture Series got off to a rousing start last week with the arrival of Jeffrey Tucker, Chief Liberty Officer of Liberty.me, to deliver the first lecture of this year’s series, entitled “Capitalism Is About Love.” If you go by the conventional wisdom, that seems to be a counterintuitive statement.Jeffrey Tucker explains how the two are actually bound up together. You can watch the lecture via the video player below, and if you haven’t had a chance to...

“This is useless. This is gratuitous. This is wonder.” –Evan Koons When we consider the full realm of Christian stewardship, our minds immediately turn to areas like business, finance, ministry, the arts, education, and so on — the placeswhere we “get things done.” But while each of these is indeed an important area of focus, for the Christian, stewardship also involves creating the space to stop and simply behold our God. Yes, we are called to be active and diligent...

When is a ban not a ban? One answer might be when it is based on moral suasion rather than legal coercion. (I would also accept: When it’s a Target.) In this piece over at the Federalist, Georgi Boorman takes up the prudence of a petition to get Target to remove smutty material and paraphernalia related to Fifty Shades from its shelves. Boorman rightly points to the limitations of this kind of cultural posturing. Perhaps this petition illustrates more of...

Jeffrey Tucker speaks at the 2015 Acton Lecture Series It’s always good to e old friends to the Acton Building. Last week it was our pleasure to e Jeffrey Tucker, author, speaker, and the founder and Chief Liberty Officer of Liberty.meto Grand Rapids in order to deliver the first Acton Lecture Series lecture of 2015, entitled “Capitalism is About Love.” (We’ll be posting audio and video of his address later this week.) Jeffrey took some time to join me in...

“Consumption serves, sustains and munity—above all the munity,” says Rev. Gregory Jensen in this week’s Acton Commentary. Consumption is not an end in itself but has a purpose. We are, Schmemann says, called by God “to propagate and have dominion over the earth”; that is to say, consumption serves human flourishing. The first chapters of Genesis portray creation as “one all-embracing banquet table,” foreshadowing a central theme in the New Testament. In the Kingdom of God we will “eat and...

Detroit home owners are being put out of their homes, but it’s not because of bankers. Then by who? It’s the Detroit city government seeking to collect back real estate taxes. There are always tax foreclosures, but foreclosures are growing from 20,000 in 2012 to an expected 62,000 in 2015. Who is putting poor people on the streets in Detroit? The government. There is a twist here based on the fact that Detroit homes have an old (and therefore way...

In the latest Journal of Markets and Morality, Joseph Gorra reviews Dr. Charlie Self’s new book,Flourishing Churches and Communities, calling it a “joyous, practical, and insightful primer to the integration of ‘faith, work, and economics” that will inspire “a pathway for leaders of Pentecostal thought to reflect on public life in a renewed way.” The book is one of four tradition-specific primers from the Acton Institute, and although it focuses specifically on a Pentecostal perspective, Gorra rightly observes that Self...

After what seemed to be an interminably long wait, Downton Abbey, a British period drama on PBS, recently returned to America. Many of us who have been hooked on the show for four seasons tune in each Sunday night to watch the new twists in the saga of the Earl and Countess of Grantham, their household, and their servants. But as with most pop culture artifacts, this series about Victorian England is having a subversive effect on the views of...

Dorothy Sayers, playwright, novelist and Christian scholar, wrote an important work in the 1930s entitled,Are Women Human?In her essay,shepresents the biblical case for gender equality in a humorous and insightful way, grounding mutuality in theological anthropology. From the Genesis narratives to the new earth of Revelation, she affirms this thesis: We are all human beings, made in the image of God with a job to do. And we do our jobs as a man or a woman. This theological vision...

Thousands of girls and women in Iraq and Syria have been captured by the Islamic State and sold into sex slavery. But one Iraqi man is trying to save them by buying sex slaves in order to free and reunite them with their families. As the Christian Post reports, “an Iraqi man, who remains nameless, disguises himself as a human trafficking dealer in order to ‘infiltrate’ the Islamic State and get the militants to sell him sex slaves. But in...