Guroian and Guptara on Speaking of Faith

Wed 25 Mar 2009 by TTF Staff

Senior Fellows Vigen Guroian and Prabhu Guptara are among the contributors to “Repossessing Virtue,” a series on the economic crisis broadcast by the American Public Media program Speaking of Faith. A one-hour program with their contributions, among others, ran on March 5 and can be found here. Uncut interviews are also available.

Guroian spoke on February 23 on the crisis of imagination that he sees behind the economic issues; you can listen and download here. (The essay he cites, “On the Choice of a Profession” by Robert Louis Stevenson, is available from Google Book Search and the Internet Archive.)

Guptara was interviewed on December 3; you can listen to his interview (with other helpful links) here

Miller interviewed on Corporate Morality

Mon 23 Mar 2009 by TTF Staff

Senior Fellow David Miller was interviewed on March 20 by the PBS show Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. You can watch the segment and read the transcript from this link.

How can we have a culture, a corporate culture that accents character, that accents the common good and not just earnings per share or a penny more per share per quarter? That’s a new culture. Is it possible that companies can make a decent profit—create wealth, create jobs, provide goods and services for society and maybe even be a moral community to develop its people? I think it can, but it will take leadership that’s committed to a new vision.

McClay on Lincoln

Wed 11 Feb 2009 by TTF Staff

Senior Fellow Wilfred M. McClay has the cover story for the January/February 2009 issue of Humanities, the magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The piece is titled “Lincoln the Great (Though He Didn’t Look That Way at the Time).”

In the 1950s, this country-boy Lincoln had morphed into the wise, prudent leader who steered the ship of Union between the wild excesses of ideologues: abolitionists on the left and proslavery fire-eaters on the right. In the 1960s, Lincoln was at first thought of as a civil-rights pioneer, but soon became criticized, even reviled, as a racist and a proponent of timid half-measures, a forerunner of the pragmatic liberalism that was so thoroughly drubbed by the New Left. Today, Lincoln is revered for his combination of faith and epistemological modesty, a skeptical believer who sought to do God’s will without ever claiming to know it—a view that requires one to overlook the fierce and relentless way he conducted the war that defined his presidency.

We too will have our own Lincoln, or Lincolns, and there is good reason to believe that ours will be as partial as anyone else’s. But we should not be content with such easy relativism. Out of respect to the man, we should at least try to recover a sense of both the grandeur and the contingency of the history that he lived through, and helped to shape.

Aitken on McDonald in the American Spectator

Mon 15 Dec 2008 by TTF Staff

Trinity Forum Europe director Jonathan Aitken has written an article on the new philanthropic initiatives of Trinity Forum Founding Chairman Alonzo L. McDonald. “When the Giving Gets Rough” appears in the December 2008-January 2009 issue of the American Spectator.

One such counter-cyclical nonprofit is the McDonald Agape Foundation (MAF), which is expanding its support for Christian scholars, professorial chairs, and education programs in leading universities such as Harvard, Yale, Duke, and Emory. This fall MAF opened its latest benefaction at Oxford—the McDonald Center for Theology, Ethics and Public Life. I predict it will make a ground breaking impact far beyond the dreaming spires of my alma mater.

Loconte on Niebuhr in Books & Culture

Mon 01 Dec 2008 by TTF Staff

Senior Fellow Joseph Loconte has a review essay in the November/December 2008 issue of Books and Culture on the new edition of Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History. “The Irony of American Politics”:

Nevertheless, many Niebuhr admirers have a disposition that blunts much of his message. They have fastened onto his critique of America's national foibles and used it like an axe to dismember U.S. foreign policy under the Bush Administration. Remarkably, they tend to ignore the religious core of Niebuhr's political thought: his Christian understanding of the tragedy of human nature. It was this German-born theologian, after all, who tried to reclaim the biblical doctrine of original sin during the inter-war period.

Johnston Profile in Christianity Today

Wed 26 Nov 2008 by TTF Staff

Senior Fellow Douglas Johnston was featured in “The Father of Faith-Based Diplomacy,” an article on Christianity Today in September.

Johnston, a globetrotting 69-year-old, founded the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy (ICRD) eight years ago because he saw religious faith as a catalyst for peacemaking, instead of a basis for conflict. Johnston . . . has learned that Muslims will listen more closely to a Christian than to the typical secular Westerner. Johnston doesn't evangelize, but his center's Christian motivation and framework are clear. "If you can operate on a faith-based basis, you find that, particularly with Muslims, they really open up," says Johnston. "This is what they like to think they're about. They get very uncomfortable dealing with just secular constructs."

The Global Culture of Debt

Fri 31 Oct 2008 by Prabhu Guptara

This essay is adapted from a presentation to the Bettag Konferenz of the EVP (Evangelical People’s Party of Switzerland), 20 September 2008. We are publishing it as background material for the Provocations short piece adapted from Professor Guptara’s lecture on “The Institutionalization of Greed”.

Read the whole entry (6533 more words)

Aikman on the New Atheism

Thu 10 Jul 2008 • Responses: 3 • by TTF Staff

Senior Fellow David Aikman, who is also Professor of History at Patrick Henry College, spoke in February for the college’s “Faith and Reason” lecture series on the “New Atheism” of writers including Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

A press release, with links to the transcript of the text (PDF) and a free MP3 recording of the lecture, is on the college web site.

The lecture, “Weaknesses of the New Atheism,” anticipates arguments in Dr. Aikman’s new book, The Delusion of Disbelief: Why the New Atheism is a Threat to Your Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness, and will be a good introduction to that volume for people considering its purchase.

McClay at the White House

Tue 06 May 2008 by TTF Staff

Senior Fellow Wilfred M. McClay recently spoke at a reception in the East Room of the White House honoring the 265th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Jefferson. You can read a transcript of his talk here, courtesy of the Ethics & Public Policy Center.

So let it be for his ideas that we honor Jefferson, above all else. And for the cause of human freedom and human dignity that he so eloquently championed. His failings may weigh against the man, but not against the cause for which he labored so heroically. That should be a lesson to us today. Like Jefferson, we all are carriers of purposes far larger than we know. Purposes whose full realization cannot be achieved in our lifetime, or even be fully understood by us, but which we are called to carry forward as faithfully as we can—as charges to keep.

Johnston on Speaking of Faith

Tue 06 May 2008 by TTF Staff

Senior Fellow Douglas Johnston was featured on a recent edition of the public radio program, Speaking of Faith. The greatest threat in the post-Cold War world, he says, is the prospective marriage of religious extremism with weapons of mass destruction. Yet the U.S. spends most of its time, resources, and weapons fighting the symptoms of this threat, not the cause. The diplomacy of the future, he is showing, must engage religion as part of the strategic solution to global conflicts.