Last week, Pope Benedict XVI addressed the Canadian Bishops who were making their ad limina visit. A worthwhile read, especially concerning the strong language His Holiness uses to condemn the symptoms of crumbling Western culture. …the fundamental task of the evangelization of culture is the challenge to make God visible in the human face of Jesus. In helping individuals to recognize and experience the love of Christ, you will awaken in them the desire to dwell in the house of...

Voltaire had a saying: “The perfect is the enemy of the good,” or, “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.” It’s often repeated, especially in public policy circles, that the perfect the enemy of the good, implying that you should favor the realistic good that can be done rather than the unattainable perfect ideal. And now you know why. Because “good” beats “perfect” in a Google Fight, and by a rather handy margin. HT: Seth’s Blog, pares “unique”, “best”, and “finest”....

The only way that culture can be truly changed, in terms of the gospel, is by movements of the Spirit that are birthed in congregational life. The Christian Right thinks that it can alter culture by direct partisan political pressure led by media personalities and tried-and-true techniques. They could not be more sadly mistaken. The failure of this approach is self-evident over the course of the past six years. The late missional theologian Lesslie Newbigin understood this well when he...

I haven’t started Marvin Olasky’s new book yet, but here’s a bit from the abstract of a new NBER paper, “Rules Rather Than Discretion: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina,” by Howard Kunreuther and Mark Pauly. Speaking of property owners who suffer severe damage and don’t have the resources to rebuild: To avoid these large and often uneven ex post expenditures, we consider the option of prehensive private disaster insurance with risk based rates. It may be more efficient to have an...

In a recent issue of Business 2.0 magazine, we are told that X Prize founder Peter Diamandis is expanding his X Prize Foundation to address new areas of innovation. The first Ansari X Prize included a $10 million purse for the first private spaceflight. The X Prize Foundation website notes that the group is “actively researching the feasibility of new prizes in space, energy, genomics, education, nanotechnology, and prizes in the social arena,” but Business 2.0 gives us some more...

Christian geneticist and author (The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Simon & Schuster Trade Sales) Dr. Francis Collins is the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Human Genome Research Institute and head of the Human Genome Project. Recently he was the keynote speaker at the 61st Annual Meeting of the American Scientific Affiliation, a group of Christian geneticists, chemists and other scientists. Over the past week I transcribed his lecture from the audio...

A press release from the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, linked over at WorldMagBlog, claims that the bankruptcy reform legislation passed last year is being “reluctantly” interpreted by the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of New York to mean that “those going through bankruptcy may not tithe to their church or make other charitable donations … until after they have paid off credit panies and other creditors. Before the new law went into effect, bankruptcy court...

From the same issue of Business 2.0 magazine I cited yesterday, check out this article on Adobe Systems, which is touted as having “The greenest office in America.” It just goes to show you that economic efficiency and environmental concerns go hand in hand. Click on the first link in the piece to get a slideshow of the various improvements which save energy and money at Adobe’s offices. My favorite is the timed outages of garage exhaust fans and outdoor...

An interesting debate is going on over at Mere Comments. The main thread has to do with the morality of the Bush Administration’s approval of over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill and the implications for Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race. Leaving those issues aside, I was struck by ment from “Daniel C.”, claiming that the problem really presents an “excellent case for dismantling the Food & Drug Administration.” It’s a question worth raising. I don’t know enough about the history or...

Jeff Mirus of CatholicCulture.org flogs an address by Capuchin friar and dean of theology at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore, Father David Couturier. I share Mirus’s assessment that “one is at times unsure exactly what Fr. Couturier means,” but some of his points do seem at odds with the vision of charity articulated by, for example, Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est, as Mirus points out. Especially perplexing is Couturier’s statement concerning the role of Capuchin Franciscans in...