Why is tonight different from all other nights? Because if you live in Los Angeles, you could face legal repercussions for celebrating the Jewish High Holy Days with family and friends. The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health ordered the public not to gather with anyone outside their immediate family to celebrate the Judaism’s holiest celebrations. But after the legal intervention of a religious liberty watchdog, county officials backed down from the most rigid forms of enforcement. “The following...

State lotteries may seem like a good thing. They raise money for government programs like public schools. People contribute their money voluntarily (unlike most forms of taxation), which removes the moral weight involved in forcing people to hand over their money. They are fun games for the participants and can be life-changing for the winners. These reasons lead many people to support – or at least tolerate – state lotteries. But the lottery deserves neither our support nor our toleration,...

Some 1.2 billion students around the world experienced school closures and an inevitable move to online learning or homeschooling toward the end of the 2019-2020 school year. Graduations and end-of-year celebrations were canceled due to COVID restrictions on public assemblies. This may have been good way to limit the contagion, but did it bring unintended consequences? Was all the creative destruction of traditional education more harmful than it was helpful? Now with the coronavirus lingering longer than most people thought...

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away on the evening of Friday, September 18, 2020, at the age of 87. She died following her fifth bout with cancer, which had metastasized to her pancreas. She is preceded in death by her husband, Martin, and is survived by two children and four grandchildren. Ginsburg, the second woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, earned her reputation at its most fervent judicial activist during her 27 years on the court. At...

Traditional religion is increasingly being replaced by a series of “new atheisms,” leading many to search for spiritual meaning elsewhere, particularly in the workplace. As a result, modern workers are more likely to view their economic activity through spiritual vocabulary, using terms like “calling” and “vocation.” Yet without the right transcendent source and ethical arc, such a development can simply lead us to new fads of self-actualization and faux self-empowerment. As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson recently argued, “everybody worships something,”...

While TikTok will continue to be available in the U.S. due to a deal between ByteDance, Oracle, and Walmart, President Donald Trump has returned to his talking points about a payment from TikTok’s parent, ByteDance, to the U.S. Treasury. Most recently he said that ByteDance will “be making about a $5 billion contribution toward education.” While it is important to have a realistic policy towards China, forcing businesses to make special contributions in exchange for approving major deals would be...

It is extremely mon for me to read anything published by Glamour. In 2018, however, a first-person profile by Clara Spera caught my attention. Spera, a Harvard-trained attorney, shared with readers a personal portrait of her grandmother, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Over the course of the last several months as Justice Ginsburg’s health began to fade more rapidly, and then again last week when news of her death was announced, I remembered this article and the humane sincerity...

This week, Alejandro Chafuen – the Acton Institute’s Managing Director, International – reflects in Forbes about parisons between Sweden’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and that of other countries. Sweden has been held up as a model by those who favor less exacting responses to the coronavirus and condemned by those who advocate for more severe measures. parison and data suggest that it is too early to hand down a judgment one way or the other, and his verdict is...

Charles Malik, the Lebanese diplomat and one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was intimately involved in the crises of his own day, from the challenge of munism to the internal challenges and problems of the West itself.For Malik all of our challenges take the form of crises which, at their deepest levels, reflect Christ’s judgement. His profoundly theological vision of global crisis, one in which crises are ongoing in the lives of individual believers as...

The Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah lasts from sundown on Friday, September 18 until sundown on Sunday, September 20, 2020. Here are the facts you need to know about the beginning of the Jewish New Year and the first of the High Holy Days. What is Rosh Hashanah? Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, takes place in the fall during the first two days of the month of Tishrei. The phrase Rosh Hashanah means “the head of the year.” By...