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Jordan J. Ballor, PhD

Senior Research Fellow and Director of Publishing

Jordan J. Ballor (Dr. theol., University of Zurich; Ph.D., Calvin Theological Seminary) is a senior research fellow and director of publishing at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty. He is also a postdoctoral researcher in theology and economics at the VU University Amsterdam as part of the "What Good Markets Are Good For" project. 

Contact

616-454-3080
linkedin.com/in/jordanballor

Videos

Latest Articles by Jordan J. Ballor, PhD

  • The disordered soul of Frank Underwood

    Fans of the critically-acclaimed Netflix original series House of Cards eagerly await the release of the fifth season later this month. Frank Underwood, masterfully played by the award

  • The middle class in an age of inequality

    Writing in 2013, Moisés Naím, formerly executive director of the World Bank and currently at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, decried the increasing impotency of elites to

  • The Christian Preference for the Poor

    This year marks the 125th anniversary of two foundational texts for the formation of modern Christian social thought. In the spring of 1891, Pope Leo XIII promulgated the encyclical Rerum

  • Politics, Character, and Competition

    The renowned economist F. A. Hayek once observed that “the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Many

Latest PowerBlog Posts by Jordan J. Ballor, PhD

  • Fusionism and Western Civ

    Pope Leo XIII, writing in the midst of social crisis at the end of the nineteenth century, wisely observed: “When a society is perishing, the wholesome advice to give to those who would restore it is to call it to the principles from which it sprang.” For the American experiment in…

  • ‘What Good Markets Are Good For’

    As of this month, I have joined the “What Good Markets Are Good For: Towards a Moral Justification of Free Markets” project as a postdoctoral researcher in theology and economics. The project is a multi-year, multifaceted endeavor, focusing on the central claim that “societies with free-market…

  • Commentary: The joy of spring

    This week’s Acton Commentary is a meditation by the Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), reflecting on the significance of spring for our natural and spiritual lives. “So that bread may come forth from the earth” takes its point of departure from the lines of Psalm 104:…

  • Defending the bourgeois virtues

    In this week’s Acton Commentary, “The middle class in an age of inequality,” I wonder who will defend the bourgeois virtues, if anyone will “speak out in praise of mediocrity, stability, and predictability.” Deirdre McCloskey has spent a great deal of time exploring…

  • Commentary: Power and the poor

    In this week’s Acton Commentary I examine the foundations of what is today identified as the “preferential option for the poor” in writings that appeared 125 years ago, Pope Leo’s Rerum Novarum and Abraham Kuyper’s “The Social Question and the Christian Religion…