OSD’s Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China has some illuminating – and somewhat staggering – insight on the current state of affairs with respect to China’s environment and how it influences their national strategic policies. It’s a fascinating look at how the munist nation is dealing with the realities of ing a global superpower. Under the heading “Developments in China’s Grand Strategy, Security Strategy, and Military Strategy” the document includes this bullet:...

As part of our participation in the blog tour for Chuck Colson’s book The Faith, we got to submit a question for Chuck to answer. Here’s our exclusive Q&A: PowerBlog: You talk about the history of the faith and tradition in your book a great deal. What do North American evangelicals stand to gain from examining more closely their own history and traditions? In what sense ought Protestantism be understood as “catholic”? Part of that great Christian tradition has to...

Vladimir Solovyov Towards the end of his life, the 19th century Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov published his “On the Justification of the Good: An Essay on Moral Philosophy” (1897). In this book, wrote historian Paul Valliere, Solovyov abandonded his vision of a “worldwide theocratic order” in favor of the more concrete demands of building a just society. With “Justification of the Good,” Solovyov (1853-1900) presented a general theory of economic and social welfare based on the idea that all human...

Richard Baxter, the seventeenth-century Puritan identified by Max Weber as embodying the Protestant ethic of “worldly asceticism,” once called for chaplains to be sent into places of work for the conversion of sinners. In a 1682 treatise titled, How to Do Good to Many, Baxter pleads with “Merchants and Rich men” to provide for “some able zealous Chaplains to those Factories” situated in lands where the Gospel had not yet taken root. He urges chaplains “such as thirst for the...

Matt Stone asks the question: What do you think are some of the challenges that remain for Christian environmental theology? I am presuming here that, if you’re the sort of Christian that likes a blog like mine, you’re not the sort of Christian who needs to have the dots joined between Christian ethics, creation care and environmental theology. But where do we go beyond the basic joining of the dots? How much more remains to be done… [snip] Personally I...

Don Surber thinks so, and it’s hard to argue his point when you see stories like this: More than 400 Canadians in the full throes of a heart attack or other cardiac emergency have been sent to the United States because no hospital can provide the lifesaving care they require here. Most of the heart patients who have been sent south since 2003 typically show up in Ontario hospitals, where they are given clot-busting drugs. If those drugs fail to...

Last week, I had the pleasure to attend one of the Acton Institute’s seminars here in Rome. Located at the campus of the Pontifical University of Regina Apostolorum, the seminar drew more than 100 religious and lay persons from all over the world. It was apparent that the topic was not only an interesting one, but also a personal one for many in the room. The presentations dealt with the papal encyclical Populorum Progressio forty years later. Asking the pertinent...

Founda study on sociobiology in The Economist (of all places). This passage on the development of liberal vice conservative tendencies was worth a chuckle: Dr Wilson and Dr Storm found several unexpected differences between the groups. Liberal teenagers always felt more stress than conservatives, but were particularly stressed if they could not decide for themselves whom they spent time with. Such choice, or the lack of it, did not change conservative stress levels. Liberals were also loners, spending a quarter...

Nicholas Wapshott’s new book Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage offers a fresh look at the political relationship and friendship of two profound leaders in the late 20th Century. While the biographical information is not new for those who have read extensive biographies of Reagan and Thatcher, the author examines some of the deep disagreements the two leaders had in foreign policy. While there were arguments between the two over the Falklands War, Grenada, sanctions, and nuclear disarmament,...

The PowerBlog has been selected as one of the host blogs for Chuck Colson’s blog tour, promoting his new book, The Faith. It’s an honor to be included among other luminaries of the blogosphere like The Dawn Treader, , and Tall Skinny Kiwi. A bit about the book: In their powerful new book The Faith, Charles Colson and Harold Fickett identify the unshakable tenets of the faith that Christians have believed through the centuries—truths that offer a ground for faith...