Religion | Religious News - www.mreligion.com

There’s a big, fairly new, global effort by Christians to cut worldwide poverty in half by 2015. Just what is this effort? A new giving initiative? A new network connecting churches in the first world with churches in the third world? A new global faith-based NGO? Sadly, no. The new effort is called the “Micah Challenge,” which turns out really to be a challenge to get Christians to call for government action. The Micah Challenge is described as “a global...

Remaking the covenant

Some theologians have taken a troubling interpretation of the Noahic covenant to support a heterodox agenda. The World Alliance of Reformed Churches, in its attempts to call a status confessionis, called various study groups and forums to report on the “global crisis of life.” To this end, both the south-south member churches forum (held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, April 23-26 2003) and the south-north member churches forum (held in London Colney, UK, February 8-11 2004) affirm that: God has made...

Acton PowerBlog’s first month

The end of April marks the conclusion to the first month of operation for the Acton Institute’s PowerBlog. Thanks to all menters and readers who have made this outreach effective. ...

2005 Samaritan award applications open

The Center for Effective Compassion has opened its 2005 Samaritan Award applications. The survey and instructions are available from May 2 through June 30. First prize is $10,000; nine runners up will receive grant writing assistance, information technology support, Web site support, and much more from nationally-acclaimed consultants. All Samaritan Award applicants will be listed in the new Web based Guide to Effective Compassion, the first online information resource to provide transparency and accountability data for privately funded U. S....

Remembering Leo XIII

On May 2, 1810, the future Pope Leo XIII, 257th Roman Catholic pope (1878-1903), is born. For a survey of the legacy of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum and the initiation of Catholic Social Teaching, as well as his confluence with the thought of Abraham Kuyper, read this article by Mark A. Noll, “A Century of Christian Social Teaching: The Legacy of Leo XIII and Abraham Kuyper.” ...

Blog market

In traversing the World Wide Web, I’ve happened across BlogShares, “a fantasy stock market for weblogs. Players get to invest a fictional $500, and blogs are valued by ing links.” As the Acton Institute PowerBlog heads toward its one month anniversary, check out it’s BlogShare value. Buy now! ...

Over the edge with the religious left

Over the course of the past few months, many leaders on the left have been ramping up their rhetoric against the influence of the much-maligned “religious right” in American politics. The most recent high-profile example came from Democratic Senator Ken Salazar of Colorado, who described James Dobson and his Focus on the Family organization as “…the Antichrist of the world” in response to their strong advocacy against the filibustering of judicial nominees. Salazar later retracted his statement in the face...

RELIGION & LIBERTY

Adam Smith and the Poor

Adam Smith did not seem to think that riches were requisite to happiness: “the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments). But he did not mend beggary. The beggar here is not any beggar, but Diogenes the Cynic, who asked of Alexander the Great only to step back so as not to cast a shadow upon Diogenes as he reclined alongside the highway....

Oct 29, 2026

Lord Jonathan Sacks: The West’s Rabbi

In October 1798, the president of the United States wrote to officers of the Massachusetts militia, acknowledging a limitation of federal rule. “We have no government,” John Adams wrote, “armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, and revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.” The nation that Adams had helped to found would require the parts of the body...

Oct 29, 2026

Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church

Religion & Liberty: Volume 33, Number 4 Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church by Christopher Parr • October 30, 2023 Portrait of Charles Spurgeon by Alexander Melville (1885) Charles Spurgeon was a young, zealous 15-year-old boy when he came to faith in Christ. A letter to his mother at the time captures the enthusiasm of his newfound Christian faith: “Oh, how I wish that I could do something for Christ.” God granted that wish, as Spurgeon would e “the prince of...

Oct 29, 2026

Jesus and Class Warfare

Plenty of Marxists have turned to the New Testament and the origins of Christianity. Memorable examples include the works of F.D. Maurice and Zhu Weizhi’s Jesus the Proletarian. After criticizing how so many translations of the New Testament soften Jesus’ teachings regarding material possessions, greed, and wealth, Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has gone so far to ask, “Are Christians supposed to be Communists?” In the Huffington Post, Dan Arel has even claimed that “Jesus was clearly a Marxist,...

Oct 29, 2026

Mistaken About Poverty

Perhaps it is because America is the land of liberty and opportunity that debates about poverty are especially intense in the United States. Americans and would-be Americans have long been told that if they work hard enough and persevere they can achieve their dreams. For many people, the mere existence of poverty—absolute or relative—raises doubts about that promise and the American experiment more generally. Is it true that America suffers more poverty than any other advanced democracy in the...

Oct 29, 2026

Creating an Economy of Inclusion

The poor have been the main subject of concern in the whole tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. The Catholic Church talks often about a “preferential option for the poor.” In recent years, many of the Church’s social teaching documents have been particularly focused on the needs of the poorest people in the world’s poorest countries. The first major analysis of this topic could be said to have been in the papal encyclical Populorum Progressio, published in 1967 by Pope...

Oct 29, 2026

C.S. Lewis and the Apocalypse of Gender

From very nearly the beginning, Christianity has wrestled with the question of the body. Heretics from gnostics to docetists devalued physical reality and the body, while orthodox Christianity insisted that the physical world offers us true signs pointing to God. This quarrel persists today, and one form it takes is the general confusion among Christians and non-Christians alike about gender. Is gender an abstracted idea? Is it reducible to biological characteristics? Is it a set of behaviors determined by...

Oct 29, 2026

Conversation Starters with … Anne Bradley

Anne Bradley is an Acton affiliate scholar, the vice president of academic affairs at The Fund for American Studies, and professor of economics at The Institute of World Politics. There’s much talk about mon good capitalism” these days, especially from the New Right. Is this long overdue, that a hyper-individualism be beaten back, or is it merely cover for increasing state control of the economy? Let me begin by saying that I hate “capitalism with adjectives” in general. This...

Oct 29, 2026

Up from the Liberal Founding

During the 20th century, scholars of the American founding generally believed that it was liberal. Specifically, they saw the founding as rooted in the political thought of 17th-century English philosopher John Locke. In addition, they saw Locke as a primarily secular thinker, one who sought to isolate the role of religion from political considerations except when necessary to prop up the various assumptions he made for natural rights. These included a divine creator responsible for a rational world for...

Oct 29, 2026

How Dispensationalism Got Left Behind

Whether we like it or not, Americans, in one way or another, have all been indelibly shaped by dispensationalism. Such is the subtext of Daniel Hummel’s provocative telling of the rise and fall of dispensationalism in America. In a little less than 350 pages, Hummel traces how a relatively insignificant Irishman from the Plymouth Brethren, John Nelson Darby, prompted the proliferation of dispensational theology, especially its eschatology, or theology of the end times, among our ecclesiastical, cultural, and political...

Oct 29, 2026