Thank you to our friends at The High Calling for excerpting this passage of Lester DeKoster’s Work: The Meaning of Your Life, recently republished by The Acton Institute and Christian’s Library Press. DeKoster, the former professor and director of the library at Calvin College and Seminary, also edited The Banner, the Christian Reformed Church’s monthly publication. Acton is grateful for its relationship with both The High Calling and DeKoster, who left his 10,000+ book library to the Acton Institute upon...

Is ‘fair trade’ more fair or more just than free trade? While free trade has been increasingly maligned, The Fair Trade movement has e increasingly popular over the last several years. Many see this movement as a way to help people in the developing world and as a more just alternative to free trade. On the other hand, others argue that fair trade creates an unfair advantage that tends to harm the poor. Dr. Victor Claar addresses this question in...

Portrait of a Child Prince, Wikimedia Commons “Anyone concerned with the future,” wrote Sergius Bulgakov, is most anxious about the younger generation. But to be spiritually dependent on it, to truckle to its opinions and take it as a standard, testifies to a society’s spiritual weakness. In any case, an entire historical period and the whole spiritual tenor of intelligentsia heroism are symbolized by the fact that the ideal of the Christian saint, the ascetic, has been replaced here by...

A public memorial for Chuck Colson is slated to take place Wednesday, May 16, at 10 a.m. at the Washington National Cathedral. The event is open to the public and will also be streamed live at nationalcathedral.org. Additional information can be found in this DeMoss News news release. For more information on Colson’s life and relationship to the Acton Institute, please visit our Chuck Colson resource page. ...

Susan Jacoby and Dinesh D’Souza met here in Grand Rapids at Fountain Street Church on Thursday, April 26, to debate the merits of religion in public discourse. The debate, co-sponsored by The Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies, was titled, “Is Christianity Good for American Politics?” Susan Jacoby is program director at The Center for Inquiry and author of The Age of American Unreason and Alger Hiss and The Battle for History. She argued for the...

“Each generation needs to re-own the rationale for Christian education,” says philosopher James K.A. Smith, “to ask ourselves ‘Why did we do this?’ and ‘Should we keep doing this?’” In answering such questions, Smith notes, “it might be helpful to point out what Christian education is not”: First, Christian education is not meant to be merely “safe” education. The impetus for Christian schooling is not a protectionist concern, driven by fear, to sequester children from the big, bad world. Christian...

During last year’s Acton University—have you signed up for this year yet?—Nelson Kloosterman gave a lecture on the subject of school choice and private education. In the latest issue of Comment magazine, Kloosterman expands on his claim that parental choice is “the next civil rights movement“: Let me begin with some ments designed to set up the discussion that follows. First, and most importantly, I believe that the fundamental issue in this matter involves parental choice, even though the far...

When es to the issue of anthropomorphic climate change, I tend to be “acognostic”—I’m not convinced we even have the cognitive ability to determine whether climate change is occurring, much less whether it can be attributed to human activity. But I have no doubt that the responses to perceived climate change have already been disastrous for humanity. Take, for example, the British government’s use of climate change as an excuse for population control. In 2010, a working paper published by...