Derick Scudder, senior pastor at Bethel Chapel Church, an evangelical congregation in the northern part of Philadelphia, pleted a 4-part series explaining why he is “done with urban ministry.” Bethel Chapel is a “Bible-teaching church focused on the Good News that Jesus died on the cross for our sins. We are a racially diverse, multi-generational group of people who want to know Jesus better.” As a pastor of a church deeply embedded in a challenging section of Philadelphia, Scudder has...

Tomorrow I’ll be offering up a more mentary on the second movie of the Hunger Games trilogy, “Catching Fire.” Until then, you can read Dylan Pahman’s engagement on the theme of tyranny, as well as that of Alissa Wilkinson over at CT. I’ll be critiquing Wilkinson’s perspective in my own review tomorrow. I think her analysis starts off strong, but she ends up getting distracted by, well, the distractions. But mend her piece to your review, and in the meantime...

At the Values & Capitalism blog, Jacqueline Otto Isaacs reviews Jordan Ballor’s Get Your Hands Dirty. Isaacs explains how Ballor articulates a vision for the proper orientation for our lives: In his recent release, “Get Your Hands Dirty,” Jordan Ballor of the Acton Institute lays out a clear case for why Christians ought to have rightly ordered lives and what that might look like. While the book took shape around a collection of essays, this message was as hard to...

Samuel Gregg’s latest, Tea Party Catholic, is now available for the Kindle. You can buy this version through Amazon, or if you prefer the paper version, visit Robert P George, professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University says, “The book is as carefully and, indeed, rigorously argued as it is provocatively titled. It is a great resource for anyone—Catholic or not—who wants to know what the Church really teaches about the moral requirements of the socio-economic and political orders.” If you...

Anne got her best friend, Diana, drunk. Sick-drunk. Neither was old enough to drink, and Anne didn’t really mean to, but…there it was. Diana’s mother was horrified, and forbade the friendship to go on. Anne was crushed. She really had made a mistake: what she thought was a cordial was wine. It was a hard lesson. If you ever read Anne of Green Gables, you know this story. Things get set aright – partly by the adults, and partly by...

Want to help the working poor this Christmas season? Nicole Gelinas has a free-market suggestion: Don’t shop on Thanksgiving. More than half a decade on, we’re still missing 976,000 jobs — and we’re missing 12 million jobs if you figure that jobs should grow as the population grows. But it’s one thing to be economically afraid. It’s another to be cut off from fully celebrating America’s all-race, all-religion family holiday because you and your fellow Americans are fearful economically. That’s...

Last weekend the second film based on the immensely popular Hunger Games series of books, Catching Fire, opened in theaters. One interesting way to view the world of Panem, Suzanne Collins’ totalitarian society that serves as the setting for the drama, is as a synthesis of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In Catching Fire, Collins suggests that whether a tyranny exercises its dominion through pleasure or oppression, under the right circumstances conscience will inevitably spur some...

The Catholic Dioceses of Pittsburgh and Erie, along with several nonprofit groups, have won a preliminary injunction against implementing the HHS mandate. U.S. District Judge Arthur J. Schwab granted an injunction in favor of these organizations. The injunction allows them to continue to offer insurance that doesn’t include contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs while litigation continues. Without the injunction, the insurance administrators for the organizations — though not the dioceses themselves — would have had to start providing the coverage...

My pastor made a good point in his sermon Sunday that the more secular we e as a nation the less we talk about “abundance.” Instead, the national dialogue of our politics shift to discussions about scarcity. Many politicians are stuck in the mindset of talking about things like wealth distribution and rationing. The more materialist and less spiritual we e as a nation, the more inclined we are to fight over the table scraps. If we don’t look to...

Christian’s Library Press has released the first in itsseries of English translations of Abraham Kuyper’s most famous work, Common Grace, a three-volume work of practical public theology. This release, Noah-Adam, is the first of three parts in Volume 1: The Historical Section. Common Grace (De gemeene gratie) was originally published in 1901-1905 while Kuyper was prime minister. This new translation is for modern Christians who want to know more about their proper role in public life and the vastness of...