Free Republic

Ron Sider, founder and president of Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA), announced yesterday (Tues, Oct. 16) that he will retire in June 2013. His replacement: a "consensus model" leadership team of two co-directors. Sider, who founded ESA in 1973, is most known for his ground-breaking 1977 book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. CT ranked the book No. 7 on its list of the Top 50 Books That Have Shaped Evangelicals. Scot McKnight, in his review yesterday of Moral Minority by David Swartz, described Sider and his influence as follows: Sider emerged out of a quietist Brethren in Christ...

68 Protestant Leaders Applaud Encyclical Call on All Christians to Respond to "Caritas in Veritate" WASHINGTON, D.C., AUG. 28, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI's latest encyclical was lauded by 68 Evangelical Protestant community leaders from the United States, Canada, England, the Netherlands, Sri Lanka and New Zealand. In a message released last month, titled "Doing the Truth in Love," a group of university leaders and professors, press editors and presidents of various institutions signed a message to "applaud" the Pope's encyclical, "Caritas in Veritate." The message called on Christians everywhere to "read, wrestle with, and respond to 'Caritas in Veritate' and...

SEVERAL DOZEN PROMINENT evangelicals have released a letter to President Bush in an effort to distinguish themselves from ardent pro-Israel evangelicals and to urge evenhandedness between Israel and the Palestinians. The letter's authors got the idea while visiting the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar, where, according to the New York Times, they "met Muslim and American diplomats who were shocked to discover the existence of American evangelicals who favored a Palestinian state." The organizers plan to translate their letter into Arabic and distribute it internationally. "As evangelical Christians committed to the full teaching of the Scriptures, we know that...

"Liberation Theology" was the theological justification for Western church groups that backed Marxist revolution 20 and 30 years ago. Its influence waned with those failed revolutions, especially in Latin America, but it continues to shape intellectual life in the Middle East, as a tool against Israel. The Jerusalem-based Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center coordinates the anti-Israel advocacy of U.S. church groups. Sabeel guides and leads U.S. church delegations when they come to the Middle East, where they are exposed primarily to a pro-Palestinian perspective. When Sabeel conducts conferences in the U.S. or Canada, North American denominations host and promote the...

Capitalism is not economic anarchy. When properly defined, it recognizes several necessary conditions for the kinds of voluntary relationships it supports. One of these is the existence of inherent human rights, such as the right to make decisions, the right to be free, the right to hold property, and the right to exchange peacefully what one owns for something else. Capitalism also presupposes a system of morality. Under capitalism, there are definite limits, moral and otherwise, to the ways in which people can exchange. Capitalism should be viewed as a system of voluntary relationships within a framework of laws that...