Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'academia'

The value of trust—and how to create it

Trusting strangers not only makes our lives easier, it makes our country more prosperous. As economist Tim Hartford says, “One of the underrated achievements of the modern world has been to develop ways to extend the circle of trust by depersonalising it.” Continue Reading...

Financial endeavors can serve the common good

“Gregg lays out a careful and detailed argument for the proposition that, done well, financial endeavors can serve the common good,” says Adam J. MacLeod in a review of Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg’s most recent book For God and Profit: How Banking and Finance Can Serve the Common Good. Continue Reading...

Understanding tax revenue and deadweight loss

Note: This is post #12 in a weekly video series on basic microeconomics. Why do taxes exist? What are their effects? In this video by Marginal Revolution University, economist Alex Tabarrok explains how taxes affect consumer surplus and producer surplus. Continue Reading...

Kyriarchy and Kuyper

Courtesy Adrian Vermeule at Mirror of Justice, I ran across a word new to me: Kyriarchy. Given the context and my admittedly limited Greek-language skills, I was able to work out the gist of the idea. Continue Reading...

Entrepreneurship and Interdisciplinary Scholarship

While reading economist (and rabbi) Israel M. Kirzner’s Competition & Entrepreneurship (1973), it occurred to me that his description of what the “pure entrepreneur” does could also be applied to what a good interdisciplinary scholar, such as someone who studies faith and economics, does (or at least aspires to do). Continue Reading...

The Calling of the Christian Scholar

In the latest issue of Themelios, Robert Covolo reviews  Abraham Kuyper’s newly translated Scholarship alongside Richard Mouw’s Called to the Life of the Mind, examining the common traits that emerge from two perspectives on scholarship from the “Kuyperian strain.” Continue Reading...

C.S. Lewis on Vocation in the Economy of Wisdom

In Abraham Kuyper’s newly translated Scholarship, he explores the Christian’s role in the Economy of Wisdom. Addressing students of Free University in Amsterdam, he asks, “What should be the goal of university study and the goal of living and working in the sacred domain of scholarship?” Continue Reading...

New Issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality (17.1)

The most recent issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality, vol. 17, no. 1, has been published online at our website (here). This issue features an array of scholarship on the foundations and fabric of free and virtuous societies, ranging from David VanDrunen’s examination of the market economy and Christian ethics, offering an unique synthesis between pro- and anticapitalist perspectives, to David Urban’s examination of liberty and virtuous self-government in the works of the seventeenth-century English poet John Milton. Continue Reading...