Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'politics'

February 27, 2024

Saving Evangelicalism

Is the power-seeking now prominent in evangelical circles a fever or a fatal disease? Is the evangelical movement unsinkable, or is it like the Titanic in 1912 after a collision with an iceberg breached five of the ship’s supposedly watertight compartments? Continue Reading...
February 09, 2024

Can This Man—and the Black Church—Save America?

America is facing the political rerun from hell: a seemingly inevitable rematch between two of the most divisive presidential candidates in recent memory. We’re once again headed for the partisan trenches in this most beloved of quadrennial fiascos: the battle to see which very senior citizen will have access to nuclear codes (and the presidential X account) for the next four years. Continue Reading...
October 18, 2023

Getting Beyond Right-Wing and Left-Wing

Back in the 1970s, Sixty Minutes had a regular feature called Point/Counterpoint, which came at the end of every show. Each week there would be a different topic. Journalist Shana Alexander would present a standard-issue “liberal” version of the argument while James J. Continue Reading...
August 01, 2023

Christianity and Liberalism: The Spirituality of the Church in a Politicized World

J. Gresham Machen’s book Christianity and Liberalism, published 100 years ago, was a curious mix of theology and politics. Readers and commentators commonly miss the political part if only because Machen, a Southern Presbyterian who labored in exile among Northern Presbyterians (the two communions were divided from the Civil War to 1983), was a proponent of the spirituality of the church, a hallmark doctrine of the Southern denomination. Continue Reading...
March 21, 2023

C.S. Lewis on the Specter of Totalitarianism

It is safe to say C.S. Lewis is not known first of all for his treatment of totalitarianism. We are familiar with Lewis the Christian apologist, Lewis the writer of children’s stories and science fiction fantasy, Lewis the literary critic and Oxford don, and then chair of medieval and renaissance literature at Cambridge. Continue Reading...
December 15, 2022

King Jesus and Political Discipleship

Our current political reshuffling has been dizzying, perhaps even more in the Christian community than among Americans in general. The conservative shift toward populism under Trump empowered both a push for real nationalism—blood, soil, industrial policy—as well as even more fringe movements such as the medieval romanticism of the Catholic integralists. Continue Reading...