Books

Creation and the Heart of Man: An Orthodox Christian Perspective on Environmentalism

November 8, 2013November 10, 2013 by Orthodox Editors

by John Couretas –
Beginning today, Acton is offering its first monograph on Eastern Orthodox Christian social thought at no cost through Amazon Kindle. Through Tues., Nov. 12, you can get your free digital copy of Creation and the Heart of Man: An Orthodox Christian Perspective on Environmentalism(Acton Institute, 2013). The print edition, which runs 91 pages, will be available later this month through the Acton Book Shop for $6. When the free eBook offer expires, Creation and the Heart of Man will be priced at $2.99 for the Kindle reader and free reading apps.

A summary of Creation and the Heart of Man:

Rooted in the Tradition of the Orthodox Church and its teaching on the relationship between God, humanity, and all creation, Fr. Michael Butler and Prof. Andrew Morriss offer a new contribution to Orthodox environmental theology. Too often policy recommendations from theologians and Church authorities have taken the form of pontifications, obscuring many important economic and public policy realities. [Read more…]

The Search For Meaning

April 25, 2013November 2, 2015 by Orthodox Editors

The Search For Meaning in Life by Dan Doyle –
Suffering comes into every life. Often it is so terrible we wonder how we can ever survive it. We can’t imagine the there could be any meaning in it. One of the most important books I’ve ever read is Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” In it he tells of his experiences as an inmate in several of the Nazi death camps during WWII. Frankl was one of the lucky ones, he survived. He was liberated at the end of the war from Auchwitz as the only survivor of his family. Out of his pain and loss, out of the hell of it all, he came away with a deeper faith in God and, ironically, in humanity. We are the lucky ones, then, who can read this small book and be edified by the powerful meaning he discovered in and through his own suffering.

When we suffer, nothing makes sense to us. We are overwhelmed with a feeling that the world is cold, indifferent to our suffering, that we are utterly alone in it and imprisoned by it. How could there be any meaning in it at all? This is the central question of Viktor Frankl’s book. The core responsibility of our individual human lives is to find meaning and purpose, not just in fame, or wealth, but in transcendent ways, through faith, hope and, most importantly through love. [Read more…]

The Dependency Agenda

July 17, 2012July 19, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

The Dependency Agenda Creating an Entitlement Society by Kevin D. Williamson –

Each year, the United States spends $65,000 per poor family to “fight poverty” — in a country in which the average family income is just under $50,000. Meanwhile, most of that money goes to middle-class and upper-middle-class families, and the current U.S. poverty rate is higher than it was before the government began spending trillions of dollars on antipoverty programs.

The Dependency Agenda uncovers the hidden politics of the welfare state and documents the historical evidence that proves that Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” was designed to do one thing: maximize the number of Americans dependent upon the government. The welfare state was never meant to eliminate privation; it was created to keep Democrats in power. [Read more…]

Defending Constantine and Christendom

May 3, 2011November 2, 2015 by Orthodox Editors

by Mark Tooley
The destruction of Osama bin Laden underlines how many U.S. church voices, even since 9/11, have adamently insisted that Christianity demands pacifism.

Much of the Evangelical Left, so influential on Christian college campuses and increasingly prominent in Washington, D.C., relies on neo-Anabaptist beliefs. Sojourners activist Jim Wallis, who last week launched a crusade against “cuts” in the 2012 federal budget, adheres partly to this tradition. These neo-Anabaptists demand total pacifism and reject the military. Unlike traditional Anabaptists, they are not separatists, and many exuberantly advocate Big Government control over medical care, food, energy, and virtually all of life. The godfather of sorts for these disjointed neo-Anabaptists was the late Mennonite theologian and Notre Dame professor John Howard Yoder. He joined most Anabaptists in assuming that Christianity was massively corrupted by 4th century Roman Emperor Constantine’s embrace of Christianity. The resulting Christendom created over 1,600 years of wars and oppression ostensibly in the name of Christ.

Constantine famously professed Christianity after winning a military battle before which a cross had appeared to him in the sky. His conversion largely ended Rome’s persecution of Christians and facilitated Christianity’s eventually becoming the majority faith for the West. [Read more…]

Death by Liberalism

April 28, 2011April 29, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Death by Liberalism - book by J.R. Dunn
Many AT readers are aware that I have been working on a book project for the past several years. I have mentioned it occasionally on this site, more often in the past few weeks as publication drew nearer. Now zero hour has arrived: Death by Liberalism. The Fatal Outcome of Well-Meaning Liberal Policies is available as of today. (Buy it here.) It’s the first publication from Broadside Books, renowned editor Adam Bellow’s new conservative imprint.

Simply put, DbL deals with the appalling and overlooked fact that liberalism kills. This is no metaphor, no exaggeration, and no mistake. Liberal policies put in place by liberal politicians to achieve liberal goals kill thousands of Americans each year. In the past half-century, liberalism may have killed up to 500,000 American citizens (and this is not even counting DDT or ethanol, which are responsible for a death rate orders of magnitude larger in the international sphere). We have known for years that liberalism is corrupt, wasteful, and futile. Now we know that it is even worse. Liberalism is lethal. [Read more…]

The Green Death, The Silent Spring Legacy

February 18, 2010February 18, 2010 by Orthodox Editors

DocZero.org | Feb. 18, 2010

Who is the worst killer in the long, ugly history of war and extermination? Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot? Not even close. A single book called Silent Spring killed far more people than all those fiends put together.

Published in 1962, Silent Spring used manipulated data and wildly exaggerated claims (sound familiar?) to push for a worldwide ban on the pesticide known as DDT – which is, to this day, the most effective weapon against malarial mosquitoes. The Environmental Protection Agency held extensive hearings after the uproar produced by this book… and these hearings concluded that DDT should not be banned.

A few months after the hearings ended, EPA administrator William Ruckleshaus over-ruled his own agency and banned DDT anyway, in what he later admitted was a “political” decision. [Read more…]

The Appearance of Design

September 25, 2009September 25, 2009 by Orthodox Editors

BreakPoint | by Stephen Meyer | Sep. 23, 2009

For almost a hundred years after the publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859, the science of biology rested secure in the knowledge that it had explained one of humankind’s most enduring enigmas. From ancient times, observers of living organisms had noted that living things display organized structures that give the appearance of having been deliberately arranged or designed for a purpose, for example, the elegant form and protective covering of the coiled nautilus, the interdependent parts of the eye, the interlocking bones, muscles, and feathers of a bird wing. For the most part, observers took these appearances of design as genuine.

Observations of such structures led thinkers as diverse as Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Maimonides, Boyle and Newton to conclude that behind the exquisite structures of the living world was a designing intelligence. As Newton wrote in his masterpiece The Opticks: “How came the Bodies of Animals to be contrived with so much Art, and for what ends were their several parts? Was the Eye contrived without Skill in Opticks, and the Ear without Knowledge of Sounds? . . . And these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from Phænomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent . . . ?” [Read more…]

United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror

March 5, 2009 by Orthodox Editors

WorldNetDaily | Mar. 1, 2009

It’s a book that will make so-called “progressives” see red.

In “United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror,” author Jamie Glazov says there’s an unholy alliance between jihadists and people like Michael Moore, Sean Penn, Ted Turner and Noam Chomsky, and, at the heart of the mutual admiration is a willingness to accept massive numbers of deaths to achieve their objectives.

What’s bound to be most infuriating to those Americans and many other westerners mentioned in the book is the way Glazov uses their own words to make the point. [Read more…]

Communism is a Powerful Anti-Christian Heresy

November 6, 2007August 1, 2020 by Orthodox Editors

by Dennis E. Engleman –

Throughout the Church age, the mystery of iniquity worked subtly and insidiously to foster unbelief. Satanically inspired humanism, which had received such impetus during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, reached its nihilistic nadir in the early twentieth century in the form of atheistic communism. The utopian ideology which is at the root of communism, and in fact of most secular thought, is seldom clearly realized even by its adherents; it has become part of the unexamined ideological inheritance of the post-Enlightenment era.

“One has to realize what communism is,” insisted Father Seraphim Rose. “Not merely a power-mad political regime, but an ideological-religious system whose aim is to overthrow and supplant all other systems, most of all Christianity. [Read more…]

Hitchens vs Hitchens

June 3, 2007 by Fr_J-H

Daily Mail | Peter Hitchens | June 2, 2007 |

Am I my brother’s reviewer? A word of explanation is needed here. Some of you may know that I have a brother, Christopher, who disagrees with me about almost everything.

Some of those who read his books and articles also know that I exist, though they often dislike me if so. But in general we inhabit separate worlds – in more ways than one.

He is of the Left, lives in the United States and recently became an American citizen. I am of the Right and, after some years in Russia and America, live in the heart of England. Occasionally we clash in public.

[Read more…]