There’s a lot of buzz in the blogosphere on Mark Steyn’s “It’s the Demography, Stupid”, which appears in today’s and is originally published in the January 2006 issue of The New Criterion. As usual, Steyn has many excellent observations about our present crises, but this article is a more extended look than his op-eds. Some highlights: The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective...

Sometimes one man’s trash is just trash. “Most people have no clue what’s involved with taking a garbage bag of stuff and getting it to the person who needs it,” said Lindy Garnette, executive director for SERVE Inc., a Manassas-based nonprofit that operates a 60-bed homeless shelter and food bank. According to this story, “Eager for Treasure, Not Trash: Charities Sort Through Piles of Donated Goods, Some of Which They Can’t Use,” by Michael Alison Chandler in The Washington Post,...

First item in this month’s Christianity Today Bookmarks. Conclusion: “Disconcertingly, Stark argues without qualification, nuance, and the balancing of perspectives that academics love so much. Nonetheless, he may be right.” ...

Public schools are now embroiled in the controversy over the teaching of intelligent design. Eric Schansberg points out that we wouldn’t have this problem if there were more choice in education. But neither education elitists nor theocrats are big on educational freedom. “They wage battle within the monopoly, hoping to capture the process and force their view of truth down the throats of others,” he writes. Read mentary here. ...

The US government is getting set to open up a set of airwave frequencies, vacating the prime estate for obscure channels that will serve its purposes just as well. In addition, the newly available channels will provide a big boost to the capabilities of current wireless providers. As Gene J. Koprowski writes for UPI, “It’s something like an eminent-domain case — except this time, the government is vacating the space in order to further the technology economy, rather than the...

The Real Clear Politics Blog passes along an op-ed from Bob Herbert, “Blowing the Whistle on Gangsta Culture,” a NYT Select item (subscription required). In the column, Herbert discusses the “profoundly self-destructive cultural influences that have spread like a cancer through much of the munity and beyond.” Tom Bevan calls the piece “suprisingly candid,” and “some stiff, righteous stuff – all the more ing from the source.” Herbert, of course, has been a NYT columnist since 1993, and Bevan thinks...

My little home town of Seminole, Oklahoma, has been scorched by the wildfires sweeping through parts of Oklahoma and Texas. My mother’s beloved horse riding trails in the rural area around Seminole are either smoldering or threatened. I talked to an old high school friend about our response to the disaster. He said, “Karen, we paid attention after those hurricanes. We’re not looking to the government for help. The churches and people all around here have been helping since the...

I’ve written about the narrower problem of generational conflict as it relates to social security policy, here and here. From a perspective that passes the broader, related cultural, economic, and moral issues, Eric Cohen and Leon Kass write in Commentary the most thoughtful and thought-provoking piece I’ve read on the matter of intergenerational responsibility and end-of-life care. Credit to Stanley Kurtz at The Corner. ...

Here are the Top 5 Acton Institute PowerBlog posts of 2005 (by number of visits): The Ethics of ‘Price Gouging’, Monday, August 29, 2005Benedict XVI on Markets and Morality, Thursday, May 5, 2005Bono: Aid or Trade?, Thursday, June 2, 2005Puggles, Malt-a-Poos, and Labradoodles, Oh My!, Tuesday, August 23, 2005Museum of Plastic Cadavers, Friday, May 20, 2005 ...

For those of you who enjoy listening to podcasts, Acton has updated its own podcast to be more iTunes friendly. We’ve added an iTunes graphic to the feed, updated our description tags, and categorized it on the iTunes music store. For those interested in checking it out, please follow this link to the iTunes Music Store (iTunes is required). ...