On March 27, 1998, Belmont Abbey College in Belmont, North Carolina, hosted a two-day symposium to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Professor Richard Weaver's seminal book, Ideas Have Consequences. From that small gathering of 100 people nine speakers were asked to submit papers. These submissions make up a rather remarkable book entitled: Steps Toward Restoration, The Consequences of Richard Weaver's Ideas.
Bulls, Bears & Golden Calves: Applying Christian Ethics in Economics by John E. Stapleford (Intervarsity Press) is both a reference for Christian thinking on specific economic topics and a helpful companion to the major economics texts of our day. The list of chapters reads like a recipe for staying up all night in group debate or private turmoil (depending on your inclination): environmental stewardship, legalized gambling, debt relief for less developed nations, population control, pornography, immigration.
Marriage is in deep trouble in America, and indeed throughout most of the Western world. The numbers tell the story. By the mid-nineties, nearly one-fifth of all white children in the U.S. lived in single-parent families, almost always headed by mothers. Well over half of all black children now live in such mother-only families. These percentages represent a spectacular increase from just a few decades ago.
In On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding, Michael Novak amends the customary political history of the American founding to reinstate its religious underpinnings. Where most Americans do well in noting the Enlightenment elements of the American regime, they have been taught almost nothing about the religious—indeed, biblical—influence on the United States’ formation as a nation. Novak applies the corrective.
It has been centuries since the Roman Catholic Church has elevated to the papacy a bishop who is both a deft shepherd and an intellectual giant; these two gifts rarely fill the Chair of Peter simultaneously. Avery Dulles, in his book The Splendor of Faith: The Theological Vision of John Paul II, mentions but two: Leo the Great and Gregory the Great–placing Pope John Paul II in company with the few who have most worthily filled the shoes of the great fisherman.
A thousand years is a long time. Hence, Richard John Neuhaus has taken on a difficult task in formulating The Second One Thousand Years: Ten People Who Defined a Millennium.
There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!'“ said Abraham Kuyper (1837—1920), a Dutch pastor-theologian by training and jack-of-many-trades by vocation. To say he practiced what he preached would be an understatement.
Most of the sixteen essays in this volume originated at a consultation on “Evangelicals and Finance” in Naperville, Illinois, in early 1998. The purpose of the book is to take “a first step toward understanding how evangelicals have thought about, used, and raised money during the twentieth century.” The majority of its authors are historians and sociologists, so the perspectives are, for the most part, historical and social in nature.
Children who spend their formative years deprived of the love and attention of caring families often have grave difficulties forming attachments throughout their lives. Locked away inside themselves, they care nothing about what others think of them—whether love, hate, or indifference. Only fear of physical force or loss of privileges can motivate them to good behavior. Otherwise, these damaged children do what they rationally calculate they can get away with—lying, cheating, stealing, and hurting others without conscience.
A committed Roman Catholic, Robert Kraynak has produced one of the most significant political books for American Catholics since John Courtney Murray's We Hold These Truths. A professor of political theory at Colgate University, Kraynak deserves mention along with Murray, Jacques Maritain, and Reinhold Niebuhr as a thoughtful commentator on the most profound of issues. His work will shake any reader, secular or faithful, to rethink the relationship between one's citizenship and one's faith.
G lobalization and the Kingdom of God contains the annual Kuyper Lecture, presented at the Center for Public Justice in 1999, along with responses by three commentators. The lecture was delivered by Bob Goudzwaard, Professor Emeritus, Free University of Amsterdam. Goudzwaard also served in the Dutch Parliament in the 1970s and is a well-respected authority on issues of Christian faith, economics, and public policy.
John Calvin, reflecting on the truths found in “secular writers,” concluded that “the mind of man, though fallen and perverted from its wholeness, is nevertheless clothed and ornamented with God's excellent gifts” ( Institutes, ii.2.15). Richard Mouw, in He Shines in All That's Fair (the text of his 2000 Stob Lectures), exhorts us to take hold of this insight, lest we miss in this world signs of God's common grace.