One of the unintended consequences of the church growth movement was the narrowing of an understanding of how Christianity contributes to mon good by reducing what Christians contribute to the local church. While the church remains vital for the moral formation of society, there are other aspects of human flourishing that require the development of other institutions as Andy Crouch recently explained at Christianity Today. This reduction has been adopted in some platforms that currently promote church planting. This church...

I’ve been a Craigslist fan for years, using it for everything from snagging free goods to securing new jobs to buying baby strollers to selling baby strollers—you name it. Yet even as I’ve e somewhat of a Craigslist veteran, swapping this for that and that for this, each experience brings with it a new set of surprises and takeaways, particularly when es to the way I view trade and exchange. Alas, in today’s giant global economy, it can be all...

Which came first, the collapse of the family or of traditional Christianity? “It’s a chicken-or-the-egg riddle, whether the disintegration of the family came first or the collapse of traditional Christian faith did,” write Elise Hilton, in this week’s Acton Commentary. “Too closely intertwined to make a call, Mary Eberstadt does pin a date on the collapse of this double helix: 1960. Why 1960? Why did God stop mattering at that point? Why did the family falter?” The full text of...

There’s some evidence that the distress associated with poverty, such as worry about where your next meal ing from, can create a negative feedback loop, leaving the poor with fewer non-material resources to leverage against poverty. In 2011, a study by Dean Spears of Princeton University associated poverty with reduced self-control. His empirical study attempted “to isolate the direction of causality from poverty to behavior,” resulting one possible explanation “that poverty, by making economic decision-making more difficult, depletes cognitive control.”...

UPS CEO D. Scott Davis was asked in a recent BusinessWeek interview, “You talk a lot about trade, global trade. What is pany’s role?” Here’s what Davis said(emphasis added): We always consider ourselves an enabler of merce. The worst thing for this country and UPS, and for the world, is protectionism. The natural reaction in a recession is people look inward and say, “Let’s put up barriers.” That stifles economic growth for everybody. I’m on the president’s Export Council, and...

As we noted yesterday, rock star Bono is now preaching the good of capitalism in alleviating poverty. James Pethokoukis at AEI illustrates exactly what happened in China when the power of entrepreneurial capitalism was unleashed. Bono spoke on the topic of capitalism and poverty at the 2012 Global Social Enterprise Event at Georgetown University: ...

As a child of the 1970s, your writer was witness to an amazing transformation in a large swath of the munity. In what seemed like a wink of an eye, clergy, religious and nuns grouped together with yippies, hippies, and other left-of-center tribes to advance progressive causes. Never you mind that much of these initiatives have little overlap with Judeo-Christian principles, just believe in your heart that Jesus would oppose genetically modified organisms and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United...

PowerBlog readers will be excused for missing this, as I suspect there are not many who frequent the MTV Teen Choice Awards. But don’t let your skepticism prevent you from watching this video of Ashton (really, “Christopher Ashton”) Kutcher’s acceptance speech, in which he exhorts the younger generation to get its hands dirty with hard work: “Opportunity looks a lot like hard work.” There are many connections to be made here with this insight, not least of which is with...

What do vegans, Catholics, and Starbucks have mon? According to attorney Mark Rienzi they all share the right to “decisions of conscience.” Starbucks has ethical standards for the coffee beans it buys. Vegan stores refuse to sell animal products because they believe doing so is immoral. Some businesses refuse to invest in sweatshops or panies or polluters,” Rienzi said in an Aug. 11 opinion essay for USA Today. “You can agree or disagree with the decisions of these businesses, but...

Hundreds of supporters of ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi were killed in Cairo this week by Egyptian security forces. The protestors, mostly members of the Muslim Brotherhood, responded by destroying Coptic Christian churches throughout the country. Here’s what you should know about what’s going on in Egypt. What is the Muslim Brotherhood? The Muslim Brotherhood, begun in 1928, is Egypt’s oldest and largest Islamist organization. Founded by Hassan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood – or al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun in Arabic – has...