A popular citation of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s justly-famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is his reference to natural law and Thomas Aquinas: How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is...

Patriarch Kirill gives an emphatic “no” in a TV interview. He points to the catastrophe of the Bolshevik Revolution and what followed. Here’s a snip from Interfax: “And then everything was broken. Eventually with great efforts, including terror, high economic indicators were reached,” the Patriarch said explaining further collapse of the USSR with the fact that the “backbone of national life was destroyed” in years of revolution. “Today our life is worse not because we are Orthodox, but because we...

Did you know that the NIV Stewardship Study Bible is available for Kindle, iPad and everywhere your smart phone goes? It’s true. Download this Bible for your Kindle emulator on your Mac, PC, smart phone, or directly to your eBook reader, and thousands of stewardship resources will be available at your fingertips. Or you can go to Apple’s bookstore and download the NIV Stewardship Study Bible for your viewing on your iDevice. Want to start your year out on the...

From the Jan. 5 Acton News & Commentary. This is an edited excerpt of “Health-Care Counter-Reform,” a longer piece Dr. Condit wrote for the November 2010 issue of the Linacre Quarterly, published by the Catholic Medical Association. For more on this important issue, see the Acton special report on Christians and Health Care. Dr. Condit is also the author of the 2009 Acton monograph, A Prescription for Health Care Reform, available in the Book Shoppe. Obamacare and the Threat to...

It is sometimes remarked in response to my treatment of the Accra Confession of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) and now World Communion of Reformed Churches (WCRC) in my book Ecumenical Babel that the Accra document is not really a confession at all. It says itself, after all, that it is a confession, but “not meaning a classical doctrinal confession, because the World Alliance of Reformed Churches cannot make such a confession, but to show the necessity and...

The latest issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality (13.2) is now available online to subscribers. This issue features a fine set of articles from Manfred Spieker, Gregorio Guitián, Joseph Burke, and Jim Skillen. It also has the usual range of book reviews, so ably overseen by the journal’s book review editor Kevin Schmiesing. This issue also has two special features. The first is a controversy between Jonathan Malesic, assistant professor of theology at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania,...

This is the Acton Commentary for January 12. “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations,” wrote French observer Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s. “If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society.” Could this organizing spirit hold the potential to transform the nation’s health care? With the House in Republican hands, it appears that the 2010 Patient Protection and...

Tom Oden In the ing Winter 2011 issue of Religion & Liberty, we are featuring an interview with Thomas C. Oden. The interview mainly focuses on the importance and wisdom of the Church Fathers and their deep relevancy for today’s Church and culture. The content below however delves into Marxist liberation theology and the direction of Oden’s own denomination, The United Methodist Church. Some of the below portion will be available only for readers of the PowerBlog. I’d like to...

Catching up on some recent mentaries. We e a new writer, John Addison Teevan, who is director of the Prison Extension Program at Grace College. He also teaches economics and Bible courses at the Winona Lake, Ind., school. This column was published Dec. 29. Sign up for the free, weekly email newsletter Acton News & Commentary here. A Tithe for Uncle Sam By John Addision Teevan Political leaders talk as if the money Americans keep (not paid in taxes) belongs...

Mark Hanlon of Compassion International writes about his experience related to the place of local churches in relief work. Contrary to the belief of some that relief and development groups “couldn’t rely on churches to do the work they needed to do in the third world. They claimed that the needed expertise and skill sets simply weren’t there,” Hanlon writes, In my three decades of experience in developing nations with Compassion International, I have witnessed the opposite. In the midst...