The Acton Institute es a new writer to mentariat today with this piece on Climategate. The Rev. Gregory Jensen is a psychologist of religion and a priest of the Diocese of Chicago and the Midwest (Orthodox Church in America). He blogs at Koinonia. —– Science and the Demands of Virtue By Rev. Gregory Jensen Contrary to the popular understanding, the natural sciences are not morally neutral. Not only do the findings of science have moral implications, the actual work of...

Bruce ic strip Mallard Fillmore has long been an excellent examination of conservative principles, current events, and problems associated with government interventionism. The strip appears in over 400 newspapers across the country. Yesterday featured a particularly simple and poignant strip humorously pointing out early attempts to crush the entrepreneurial spirit and the free market. The December 13 strip simply speaks for itself. Right before I saw the strip yesterday I just finished reading a proposal in Michigan that has the...

Via Beliefnet, Rev. Richard Cizik, formerly of the National Association of Evangelicals, who once called global warming the “third rail” of evangelical politics, and who also said that evangelicals “need to confront population control,” is at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. In this video, Cizik speaks of the critical role that “people of faith” have in translating the challenge of climate change into concrete political action. He says in part, “I don’t believe this moment in time is not without...

Amidst all the craziness of l’affaire d’Tigre there are some important questions being raised about the linkage between power, wealth, and faithfulness. The Wealth Report at The Wall Street Journal asks, “Is it harder to stay faithful with large wealth?” The initial sociological findings don’t seem to correlate wealth with adultery, at least at any higher rates than the general population of males (interestingly enough, a 2007 survey led to the conclusion, “When es to infidelity, money has a bigger...

The question: Is this Copenhagen global warming conference an environmental pilgrimage for some? Says one demonstrator: “You can call it, like, some kind of a new religion, I don’t know … ” But the guy in the polar bear costume isn’t so sure. ...

Breaking news: India, China walk out of climate summit So much for the “God moment.” Seeing as how this was our last chance and all, I think I’m going to take the afternoon off to go get my affairs in order. Mind Boggling: How could world leaders e to a consensus when Chin-Strap the Polar Bear and the Guardian Angels of the Climate were all in agreement? Unity in diversity! It was so spiritual! The mind reels. CONSENSUS! No, seriously,...

In his essay, “Intellectuals and Socialism,” Friedrich Hayek asked how it was possible for a small group of people to have such influence on the ideas and politics that affected millions. He argued that it was because the socialists influenced the “influencers”–those “secondhand dealers in ideas” like the press, educators, and editors, who spread socialist thought into the mainstream. A parallel can be seen in the cultural battles over religious symbols during the Christmas … I mean, the holiday season....

Over at the Catholic Thing, Scott Walker looks at Climategate and the intolerant groupthink undergirding the “consensus” on global warming. He starts by offering a quote from sociologist Robert Nisbet on “the Enlightenment myth that the Catholic Church brutally oppressed Galileo. Our own time, Nisbet insisted, has seen much worse.” Galileo, as it turns out, was more concerned about the reaction of fellow scientists than he was about Pope Urban VIII and the Inquisition: Most important for our purposes is...

Update: Naturally, right after I post this article, new es out that makes Climategate look even worse. It’s been noted in ments that Russian scientists are now saying outright that climate data from Russian weather stations has been tampered with in order to make it appear to substantiate claims of catastrophic man-made global warming: On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the...

My mentary this week looks at As We Forgive, a moving documentary about reconciliation and forgiveness in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. As I reflected on forgiveness in my own life, my thoughts fell on a dear friend who died very young and my feelings towards the man who took his life. The mentary follows: Two and a half years ago I lost my good friend, Tim. He had just reenlisted for his second term in the Army after...