The Armed Forces Journal has a noteworthy essay on professionalism titled, “In Praise of Mavericks.” The author, Michael Wyly, is a retired Marine Colonel who served bat tours in Vietnam. The central theme of Wyly’s piece is that true professionals choose to do something rather than be someone. The essay discusses the importance of character, service, and moral integrity over career advancement fort. Wyly notes: Courage is a virtue. In the military profession, courage tops the list of virtues required...

An update on my post about “Canada’s Faltering Freedom” a few weeks ago: Common sense seems to have prevailed up north, as Canada’s human mission dismissed plaint against journalist Mark Steyn ments made about Islam, while the same body cleared a Catholic magazine of wrongdoing for ments about homosexuality. Rightfully, religious leaders in Canada are not relaxing in the wake of these minor victories. Citing other abuses by provincial human rights panels, Calgary’s Bishop Frederick Henry is leading a charge...

Cleaner skies explain surprise rate of warming ...

I’ve noted this quote on the blog before, but Ray’s post on professionalism sparked recall of another kind of professional, the professional bureaucratic manager: Government insists more and more that its civil servants themselves have the kind of education that will qualify them as experts. It more and more recruits those who claim to be experts into its civil service. And it characteristically recruits too the heirs of the nineteenth-century reformers. Government itself es a hierarchy of bureaucratic managers, and...

Sir John Templeton, the great entrepreneur and philanthropist, passed away on July 8, 2008. Fr. Robert Sirico, president of the Acton Institute, marks his passing with this tribute: It was with great sadness that I learned today of the passing from this life of one of the twentieth-century’s great stalwarts in the struggle for faith and liberty. Rising from a humble background in Tennessee, John Templeton graduated from Yale and Oxford universities, the latter of which he attended as a...

mentary from last week (“Christianity and the History of Freedom”) elicited a thoughtful response from a blogger named Jonathan Rowe, who subsequently invited me to join his blog, American Creation. Rowe and his colleagues debate the concept of a “Christian America,” especially focusing on the question of religion and the Founding. If you’re interested in the issues raised by mentary and by Acton’s film, The Birth of Freedom, you might enjoy American Creation. My first post is a direct rejoinder...

One aspect of the recent discussion over the faith-based initiative, focused anew because of Barack Obama’s pledge to expand the executive effort, is the importance of the White House office as a model and catalyst for similar efforts at the state and local levels. In the Spring 2006 issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality, we published a Symposium with papers based on a discussion titled, “The Ethics of Faith-Based Policy,” sponsored by the Center for Political Studies at...

Yesterday I was a guest on “The Jesse Lee Peterson Radio Show,” a production of BOND (Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny), to discuss the presidential election and the faith-based initiative, with a special focus on the proposals laid out by Democratic candidate Barack Obama. A streamlined version of the interview is available for download. After the July 1 speech in Zanesville, Ohio, where Obama called his plan for a new Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships “a critical part”...

The second week of the CRC’s Sea to Sea bike tour is in the books. The second leg of the journey took the bikers from Kennewick to Boise, a total distance of 321 miles. There’s a basic theme in the daily prayers from the “Shifting Gears” devotional. There is a fundamentally environmental focus, and by that I mean not just the natural environment, but the economic, political, and social environment of the areas through which the bikers progress. For instance,...

A round-up of diverse items of interest, in no particular order: “Iraq to open consulate in San Diego,” (and Detroit). Facing difficulties in reaching the populations of Iraqis in the US, Iraq is planning to open consulates in San Diego and Detroit. “The Bush administration set a goal of admitting 12,000 Iraqi refugees this year.” This rather meager es years after the invasion and after hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have had to flee to other countries for safety. Too...