Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'reason'

February 14, 2014

Toward a Civilization of Love

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, I offer this wonderful bit from Jennifer Roback Morse’s transformational book, Love and Economics, in which she observes a particular vacancy in modern discourse and policymaking: Economics has been a successful social science because it focuses on things that are true: human beings are self-interested and have the capacity for reason. Continue Reading...
March 30, 2012

Morlino: Religious Freedom Defended with Charity and Reason

Yesterday in his personal column for the Diocese of Madison’s Catholic Herald, Bishop Robert C. Morlino issued a call to arms to Catholics battling for their religious freedom. But such a battle, he says, is one that should emulate Christ’s loving nature, while being resolutely clear and firm in rejecting the obligation of Catholic institutions to provide healthcare that includes contraceptives and abortifacients under the Obama administration’s controversial HHS mandate (see recent reactions below on EWTN by U.S. Continue Reading...
September 22, 2011

On Locke and Aquinas: Reason, Will, and Law

Greg Forster’s latest response to Sam Gregg, Acton’s director of research, on the utility of John Locke’s thought today is up over at Public Discourse. There’s a lot to learn from reading these exchanges, but right now I want to focus just briefly on one of the criticisms that Sam levels against Locke. Continue Reading...
December 29, 2009

Robby George and the Reformation on Reason

Ryan T. Anderson, editor of the Witherspoon Institute’s Public Discourse, takes note of an in-depth NYT profile of Prof. Robby George (HT: MoJ). In the NYT profile, George is presented as the central figure in the formation of the ecumenical coalition behind the Manhattan Declaration, and adds a number of important contexts for George’s academic, intellectual, and political endeavors. Continue Reading...
July 27, 2009

The Truth Will Set Us Free

God is rational, and the universe is governed by unchanging natural laws instituted by Him. The Bible tells us in the Book of Genesis that “God created the heavens and the earth.” Continue Reading...
December 09, 2008

Kathleen Parker and “Secular Reason”

Kathleen Parker has a major case of secular reason sickness and it needs to be cured. I’ll keep this short and simple. Here is an offensive line from one of Kat’s latest columns: How about social conservatives make their arguments without bringing God into it? Continue Reading...
November 13, 2006

The Catholicity of the Reformation: Musings on Reason, Will, and Natural Law, Part 7

This post concludes my series on the largely forgotten catholicity of Protestant ethics, with a few brief remarks and reflections. My goal for this series, as stated in Part 1, was to show that voluntarism and nominalism are not the same thing, that two important Reformed theologians (Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi) had more than a passing interest in Thomism (or intellectualism as Pope Benedict XVI referred to it in his now famous Regensburg address), and that evangelicals need to revisit their wariness on the capacity of reason to discern moral truth. Continue Reading...