This post examines Peter Martyr Vermigli’s understanding of natural law, while Part 6 will take up the natural-law thinking of Jerome Zanchi, Martyr’s former student and colleague. Martyr was born in Florence in 1499, entered the Augustinian Canons, and took a doctorate in theology at the leading center of Renaissance Aristotelianism, the University of Padua. His favorite authors were Aristotle and Thomas. In Italy he enjoyed a distinguished career as teacher, preacher, and abbot. By 1540 he was already Protestant...

About a month ago I posted some responses to the editorial position taken at the Economist. One of their claims was with regard to the Kyoto Protocol and that “European Union countries and Japan will probably hit their targets, even if Canada does not.” At the time I registered skepticism with respect to these estimates. Turns out my skepticism was well-founded. From Wired News: Between 1990 and 2004, emissions of all industrialized countries decreased by 3.3 percent, mostly because of...

The Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy will be holding a theological conference on the subject of “Economy: Love of God, Production, and the Free Market.” Taking place tomorrow (Tuesday), you can either follow it live or read the proceedings later at the dicastery’s web site. ...

We’ve just posted the audio from Chuck Colson’s remarks at the Acton annual dinner in Grand Rapids on October 26. This link will take you there. “We are the people of the truth,” Colson told the more than 500 people assembled at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel. “We believe there is ultimate reality and we believe it is knowable. And that puts us up against our culture.” One of the nation’s most prominent evangelical Christians, Colson is founder of Prison...

Just in time to celebrate All Saints Day, I’m hosting this week’s Christian Carnival over at The Evangelical Ecologist. I visited each site while building the carnival page and was impressed by what was there. If it’s been a while since you’ve had a chance to expand your blogroll or your boundaries of contemporary Christian thought, you really should drop by. You’ll be encouraged and challenged in many ways. If you’re a Christian blogger, you can find out more about joining...

For those still interested, the latest installment of the Bill Moyers/Cal Beisner saga is in (for those of you who need refreshing, check out the posts here, here, and here. Moyers summarizes his side of the story with links here, under the section titled “Moyers and Beisner Exchange”). Last week, on Oct. 25, Bill Moyers circulated another letter to Beisner (linked in PDF here). As of Friday, Oct. 27, Beisner said, “Granted that I hope to pursue reconciliation consistent with...

The role of evangelicals in the public square has been a major development in American life over the past twenty-five or thirty years. A recent spate of popular books has looked at this phenomenon very critically. The number of books from the political and religious left, arguing against the rise of the newer evangelical right, makes for a full shelf of books by now. Most of these popular and poorly written books sound like dire warnings about ing religious takeover...

Hugh Hewitt interviewed Andrew Sullivan on the radio last week about Sullivan’s book, The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back. Discussing the value of various figures throughout history as moral heroes, Sullivan speaks of “the great question that Pilate asked, what is truth? The truth is not quite as easy and as simple as we sometimes think it is. And the truth about everything, the meaning of the whole universe, is something that is, by...

One thing that they do over at GetReligion is track “ghosts” in news stories. I think I found one this morning on the CBS Morning Show, and it’s fitting to talk about it given that today is Halloween. The piece was on the charitable work of a Houston policeman, Bob Decker, who founded the charity Paper Houses Across the Border (video here). As part of their “Heroes Among Us” series, based on profiles published in People magazine, CBS described Decker’s...

In a missioned by the UK government, Sir Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank, argues that the cost of waiting to take action to curb CO2 emissions will outpace other economic arguments against action on climate change. The BBC reports (HT: Slashdot) that Stern found “that global warming could shrink the global economy by 20%,” but that this opportunity cost for not taking action immediately could be offset by moving now: “Taking action now would cost...