Acton senior fellow Marvin Olasky examines the possibilities in his column. ...

In the prefatory address to King Francis in Calvin’s 1535 edition of the Institutes, Calvin cites Hilary of Poitiers approvingly: Indeed, Hilary considered it a great vice in his day that, being occupied with foolish reverence for the episcopal dignity, men did not realize what a deadly hydra lurked under such a mask. For he speaks in this way: “One thing I admonish you, beware of Antichrist. It is wrong that a love of walls has seized you; wrong that...

On National Review Online, Sam Gregg, Acton’s director of research, takes a look at the new Father-General of the Society of Jesus and what’s ahead for “one of Catholicism’s most influential — and controversial — religious orders.” The Jesuits are dealing with a steep decline in numbers and other serious problems, as Sam points out: Many Jesuit universities have e virtually indistinguishable from your average left-wing secular academy. Some Jesuits candidly say the order’s intellectual edge began seriously fraying in...

St. Maximos the Confessor Today the Orthodox Church remembers St. Maximos the Confessor, the great saint who — virtually alone — stood against the Monothelite heresy and its powerful allies in the Church and in the Byzantine Empire. The importance of St. Maximos (580-662) also is built on his work in the Philokalia, the collection of texts written between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries by spiritual masters of the Eastern Christian tradition. Here is St. Maximos on truth (Third...

Over at the OrthodoxNet.org blog, editor Chris Banescu had an entertaining exchange in ment boxes with a writer who asserted that “capitalism can be just as infected with materialism and the itant need to tyrannize munism.” Here is Chris’ response: Capitalism is really not an ideology. It simply describes reality, like mathematics and economics describe reality. It’s a word that explains how free human beings interact voluntarily with one another to exchange value and how they invest the excess of...

When I lived in Egypt one of the Egyptian drivers for diplomats at the American Embassy in Cairo explained how people had to wait five to seven years for a phone. He proudly stated he was on the list, but poked fun at the long wait for service. Of course, he also added that you might be able to speed the process up by a few months with bribes, or as it is more affectionately knows as in Egypt, “baksheesh.”...

Related to John’s post about “natural” capitalism (and as I previously promised in the context of the “new” evangelicalism), I’d like to point to this summary of the contemporary situation from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, speaking of a left/right political divide: This bifurcation is itself an important clue to the central characteristics of modern societies and one which may enable us to avoid being deceived by their own internal political debates. Those debates are often staged in terms of a...

This week, January 18-25, is the worldwide Week of Prayer for Christian Unity (HT). The week is “encouragement of the World Council of Churches’ Faith and Order Commission and the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.” To mark the end of the week, the WCC’s general secretary Samuel Kobia and Pope Benedict XVI “will meet in Rome on 25 January, at a ceremony to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. The WCC said...

It appears the citizens of an anti-democratic China have stood up to government authorities who are suggesting smoke free restaurants in preparation for this year’s Summer Olympics. The Beijing Disease Control and Prevention Center urged restaurants in the Chinese capital pletely ban smoking on their premises. While the smoking ban is only a suggestion, the article declares not a single restaurant has taken up the suggestion in the city of Beijing. Even though the United States has fewer smokers by...

Add Colorado to the list of state governments sharpening the points of the already thorny problem of church and state. Catholic News Agency reports on a kerfuffle between Archbishop Charles Chaput (on behalf of Catholic Charities of Colorado) and the state’s legislature over a pending bill that would restrict religious organizations’ ability to discriminate on the basis of religion in their hiring. (The regulation applies, of course, to groups that take government funds.) In other words, a non-profit such as...