Imagine you’re at the checkout line at the supermarket and the clerk asks how much e your family earns each year. Offended, you ask why that is any of her business. “We need to know to determine how much sales tax you need to pay,” the checker politely explains. “If you’re classified as the ‘working poor’ you need to pay more sales tax.” “I think you have that backwards,” you helpfully add. “You mean the working poor need to pay...

Over at Think Christian, I take a look at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and derive a lesson from Jesus’ interaction with the rich young man in Mark 10. A basic lesson we can take from the decision to organize the initiative as an LLC rather than a traditional non-profit corporation is that pursuing social good is possible in a wide variety of institutional forms. A for-profit incorporation doesn’t preclude a main, or even primary, purpose aimed at social good. Just...

In his book Living the Truth, the German Thomist Josef Pieper presents the following thesis: All obligation is based upon being. Reality is the foundation of ethics. The good is that which is in accord with reality. He who wishes to know and to do the good must turn his gaze upon the objective world of being. Not upon his own “ideas”, not upon his “conscience”, not upon “values”, not upon arbitrarily established “ideals” and “models”. He must turn away...

In an email last week, GMOInside.org – a coalition opposed to genetically engineered and genetically modified organisms, which counts shareholder activist group As You Sow a member – blasted an email chock-a-block with material for two previous posts (here and here). And es a third PowerBlog post about the activists’ effort to roll back Senate support for the Safe and Affordable Food Labeling (SAFE) Act, dubbed the DARK Act (Deny Americans the Right to Know Act – get it?). Readers...

Special window display at the Acton Building For the holiday season this year, the Acton Institute has a very special window display facing Veteran’s Park and Fulton Street in downtown Grand Rapids. The window display, “Wise men still seek Him” features a rare nativity set, Cathedral glass-inspired paint, and more. Acton’s president and co-founder, Rev. Robert Sirico, inspired the work, wanting to create a proper display for his personal precepio (extended nativity scene). It’s said that in 1223, St. Francis...

Fifty years ago today, on December 7, 1965, Pope Paul VI promulgated the Declaration on Religious Freedom (Dignitatis humanae). This document produced by the Second Vatican Council clarified the Catholic Church’s views on religious liberty, changed the way the Church interacted with states, and helped foster ecumenical relations with other faith traditions. Since the release of Dignitatis humanae, the importance of defending religious freedom has e even more necessary. As Archbiship Charles J. Chaput has said, “In some ways, the...

King William III of England needed money, so in 1696 he decided to implement a new property tax. To make sure the tax was progressive (i.e., affected the rich more than the poor), the parliament devised a seemingly clever idea: they’d use the number of windows as an index for the value of a house. The assumption was that larger homes, presumably owned by the wealthy, would have more windows than the houses of the poor. All a tax assessor...

Series Note: Jobs are one of the most important aspects of a morally functioning economy. They help us serve the needs of our neighbors and lead to human flourishing both for the individual and munities. Conversely, not having a job can adversely affect spiritual and psychological well-being of individuals and families. Because unemployment is a spiritual problem, Christians in America need to understand and be aware of the monthly data on employment. Each month highlight the latest numbers we need...

If you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, but if teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. But what if a man knows how to fish but can’t afford a fishing pole? Or what if he knows how to sew but can’t afford a sewing machine? Can farm, but lacks a plow? The recognition that some people have skills to make themselves self-sufficient but lack capital to buy the tools they...

This is just a brief note, a cohortative: Let us pray! For those tempted to disdain prayer in favor of work in alleviating the ills of the world, I mend C.S. Lewis’ essay, “Work and Prayer.” There he writes, among other things, “Prayers are not always—in the crude, factual sense of the world—’granted’. This is not because prayer is a weaker kind of causality, but because it is a stronger kind.” From of old prayer has been recognized, in John...