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Vindicating Their Ancient Rights and Liberties
Lord Acton, the great historian of freedom, understood that “liberty is the delicate fruit of a mature civilization.” The liberty of which he spoke embraced a broad scope of human freedom, including dimensions political, intellectual, economic, and, especially, religious. The civilization of which he spoke was the West, whose heritage of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christian faith indelibly marked it and inexorably pushed it toward the full panoply of liberties we enjoy today and to which the rest of the world looks.Do unto Cuba as We Do unto China
Earlier this summer the White House and Congress agreed on legislation that would permit sales of American food and medicine to Cuba for the first time in twenty-eight years. Some conservatives have opposed this deal because they think it will prop up one of the last remaining communist regimes. In reality, however, this legislation is a moral victory that should help achieve Pope John Paul II’s desire for Cuba to “open itself up to the world, and … the world to open itself up to Cuba.”Christian Leadership Books' Great Cloud of Unknowing
The church has always been susceptible to having the waves of secular enthusiasm wash over it. In the 1920s and 1930s we saw the emergence of the Social Gospel; in the 1970s and 1980s we saw the rise of liberation theology, which is essentially Marxism with salsa. On a less political plane, we have seen Christian aerobics programs at the height of the fitness craze and Christian punk-rock bands during the new wave era.The Liberty to Know, to Utter, and to Argue
Lord Acton, the great historian of freedom, understood that “liberty is the delicate fruit of a mature civilization.” The liberty of which he spoke embraced a broad scope of human freedom, including dimensions political, intellectual, economic, and, especially, religious. The civilization of which he spoke was the West, whose heritage of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christian faith indelibly marked it and inexorably pushed it toward the full panoply of liberties we enjoy today and to which the rest of the world looks.The Bedrock of Business Ethics
I studied ethics for years in seminary and represent a tradition that has done some serious thinking on the subject. Even so, what is called “ethics” in many business schools cannot be found in Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. “Business ethics” as it is usually taught is not ethics in any traditional sense but an ideology committed to “social justice” and other fuzzy abstractions that, to my way of thinking, conflict with the Ten Commandments.How Christianity Created Capitalism
- Capitalism, it is usually assumed, flowered around the same time as the Enlightenment–the eighteenth century–and, like the Enlightenment, entailed a diminution of organized religion. In fact
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In the Meadow That Is Called Runnymede
Lord Acton, the great historian of freedom, understood that “liberty is the delicate fruit of a mature civilization.” The liberty of which he spoke embraced a broad scope of human freedom, including dimensions political, intellectual, economic, and, especially, religious. The civilization of which he spoke was the West, whose heritage of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christian faith indelibly marked it and inexorably pushed it toward the full panoply of liberties we enjoy today and to which the rest of the world looks.Toward Responsible Stewardship
What does Christianity teach about the place of the environment in political and personal ethics? I can think of no clearer statement than that provided by Pope John Paul II in his 1991 Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus. In one passage, the pope addresses environmental issues by saying that ecological problems result when “man consumes the resources of the earth and his own life in an excessive and disordered way.The Ecological Garden
... the Lord formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, ... took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till and keep it. (Gen. 2:7-8, 15 nrsv)Can Christian Theology Let the Trees Do the Talking?
In 1958, an eighty-seven-year-old Stoney Indian by the name of Walking Buffalo spoke to an audience in London, England. The question before him that day was something like: “Why, in the end, could white Americans and native Americans not get along?” He gave this extraordinary answer:Keeping Stable the Fabric of the World
In 1997 the Media Research Center surveyed prime-time television’s portrayal of the businessman. The results, while not surprising, were sobering. The study found that, on television, businessmen committed far more crimes (29.2 percent) than those in all other occupations, including career criminals (9.7 percent). Overall, businessmen were shown making a contribution to society 25 percent of the time, but they cheated to get ahead almost 30 percent.The Heritage of the Spanish Scholastics
The Yucatan was the center point of one of the most im- portant moral debates in history. It can be summarized in the title of the book, In Defense of the Indians: The Defense of the Most Reverend Lord, Don Fray Bartolome de Las Casas, of the Order of Preachers, Late Bishop of Chiapa, Against the Persecutors and Slanderers of the Peoples of the New World Discovered Across the Seas.