If you weren’t able to make it to Derby Station on Wednesday for our latest Acton On Tap event, have no fear: we’re pleased to present the full recording of the evening’s festivities featuring Dr. Carl Trueman of Westminister Seminary via the audio player below. If you’re unfamiliar with Dr. Trueman or his work, check out Jordan Ballor’s introduction right here. Considering that the PowerBlog’s focus over the past few days has been on how Christians are approaching the debt...

Jim Wallis and a number of other Christians involved in politics are trying to gain attention for the question, “What would Jesus cut?” The answer to this question is supposed to be as obvious as it is in other moral contexts. For example, would Jesus lie about the useful life of a refrigerator he was selling for Best Buy? No way. Would he bully a kid into giving away his lunch money? Not a chance. Would you find him taking...

Last week’s issuance of “A Call for Intergenerational Justice: A Christian Proposal on the American Debt Crisis” has occasioned a good bit of discussion on the topic, both here at the PowerBlog and around various other blogs and social media sites. It has been interesting to see the reaction that ments about the Call have generated. Many have said that I simply misunderstood or misread the document. I have taken the time to reread the document and do some reassessment...

My first reaction to “What Would Jesus Cut?” is that it tends to reduce Christ to a distributor of material goods through government programs. Jesus is not a budget overseer or a dispenser of government largesse. Sojourners founder Jim Wallis has already countered this accusation with his own post saying, “We haven’t been trying to get Jesus to be the head of any mittee, or think that he would ever want that job!” But still, to use Christ as an...

A brilliant assessment of where we are. (HT: American Orthodox Institute Observer). Subject to the governor of the universe: The American experience and global religious liberty March 1, 2011 – Most Rev. Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., Archbishop of Denver, addressed the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University. A friend once said – I think shrewdly — that if people want to understand the United States, they need to read two documents. Neither one is...

The President of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, visited Pope Benedict XVI in the Vatican yesterday, and the Vatican’s daily newspaper L’Osservatore Romano carried a front-page article by Piñera on “Economic Development and Integral Development,” a theme of great interest to us at Acton and the subject of our current conference series Poverty, Entrepreneurship and Integral Development. Chile is justly famous for its acceptance of free-market economics through the influence of the “Chicago Boys” who studied under Milton Friedman and others at...

I posted some initial thoughts on “A Call for Intergenerational Justice: A Christian Proposal on the American Debt Crisis,” which was released by the Center for Public Justice and Evangelicals for Social Action yesterday. I’ve been engaged in what I think are largely helpful conversations on this document in a number of venues in the meantime. Gideon Strauss challenged me to look at the document again, and reconsider my criticisms, and I have been happy to do so. For instance,...

I’m not sure I have ever really encountered the term intergenerational justice before this discussion over “A Call for Intergenerational Justice,” at least in any substantive way. This unfamiliarity is what lay behind my initial caveat regarding the term, my concern that it not be understood as “code for something else.” The Call itself provides a decent definition of the concept, or at least of its implications: “…that one generation must not benefit or suffer unfairly at the cost of...

Ray’s post pointed to something that’s been bugging me about Jim Wallis’ “What Would Jesus Cut?” campaign. As with the “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign (“Transportation is a moral issue.” What isn’t these days?), Wallis’ campaign assumes the moral high ground by appropriating the Holy Name of Jesus Christ to advance his highly politicized, partisan advocacy. Jesus es an advertising slogan. And what is implicit here is that those who oppose Wallis are somehow at odds with the Gospel of...

Now is a great time to check out Acton’s first documentary, The Call of the Entrepreneur. Call of the Entrepreneur's new design. The website has pletely redesigned to be more user friendly and attractive. You will find links to social media forCall of the Entrepreneur as well as options to share the documentary with your friends at the bottom of the site. We’ve also added the high definition trailer to the site. The only trailer available on the previous website...