Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'history'

August 10, 2007

The New Martyrs

People light candles below a wooden cross at a site south of Moscow where at the height of Josef Stalin’s political purges 70 years ago firing squads executed thousands of people perceived as enemies of communism. Continue Reading...
July 16, 2007

Charles Wesley: 300 Years

O for a thousand tongues to sing My great Redeemer’s praise, The glories of my God and King, The triumphs of His grace! The great hymn writer Charles Wesley was born three hundred years ago in 1707. Continue Reading...
March 14, 2007

Turnabout is fair play?

The nation which hosted a large conference welcoming Holocaust deniers last year is now full of righteous indignation over historical inaccuracies in the film ‘300’. As Azadeh Moaveni reports from her daily travels in Tehran, “Iranians buzzed with resentment at the film’s depictions of Persians, adamant that the movie was secretly funded by the U.S. Continue Reading...
March 09, 2007

‘300’

I’m planning on going to see the film ‘300’ tomorrow, in all its IMAX glory. This despite Scott Holleran’s quite critical review that calls the film “history hijacked by horror,” and says that “The script is filled with words—tyranny, freedom, reason—that go completely unsupported and have no meaning. Continue Reading...
February 27, 2007

The happiness conundrum

This piece from the Scientific American examines the difficulty that human beings have achieving happiness even in a world characterized by material prosperity. “Once average annual income is above $20,000 a head, higher pay brings no greater happiness,” writes Michael Shermer, in the context of Richard Lay૚rd’s observation that “we are no happier even though average incomes have more than doubled since 1950.” Continue Reading...
June 13, 2006

History and empire

John Wilson, editor of Books & Culture, writes up a summary of the proceedings of The Historical Society’s conference, “Globalization, Empire, and Imperialism in Historical Perspective.” “We urgently need an antidote to the journalistic clichés and the even more deplorable pseudo-scholarly discourse surrounding the interlocked themes of globalization, empire, and imperialism. Continue Reading...
May 16, 2006

Jaroslav Pelikan 1923-2006

Jaroslav Pelikan, the great historian of the Christian Tradition, died May 13 at his home in Hamden, Conn. He was 82 years old and had been battling lung cancer. Pelikan wrote more than 30 books and over a dozen reference works covering the entire history of Christianity. Continue Reading...
March 17, 2006

Faith and the founding fathers

This is an article worth reading by Steven Waldman in the Washington Monthly, “The Framers and the Faithful: How modern evangelicals are ignoring their own history.” The article examines the attitudes of many 18th century evangelicals toward government, and specifically with respect to a number of the founding fathers, including Jefferson, Madison, and Patrick Henry. Continue Reading...
February 02, 2006

Silly me

From the State of the Union: “Yet the destination of history is determined by human action, and every great movement of history comes to a point of choosing.” And all along I’ve been thinking it was divine providence. Continue Reading...
January 11, 2006

King’s dream: beyond black and white

As the nation prepares to celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. on Jan. 15, it’s time to broaden the discussion of race relations in America to include not just blacks and whites, but Asians, Hispanics and Native Americans. Continue Reading...