The National Urban League forgot to invite me to be one of the keynote speakers at their annual conference meeting in St. Louis this week, July 25-28. I’m not mad. I’m sure it was just an oversight. I would have been much cheaper than Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards. But, if had a platform at the conference I would make the case that black America will self-destruct if we don’t address the following issues immediately: (1) The marriage...

If you haven’t checked out this piece in the most recent issue of Religion & Liberty, you owe it to yourself to do so: “The Leaky Bucket: Why Conservatives Need to Learn the Art of Story,” by David Michael Phelps. In this essay, Phelps makes the claim, “While conservativism is now a powerful force in the American political landscape, it is still the underdog in a war of connotation. (This is evident in the fact that the phrase passionate conservative’...

Readings in Social Ethics: Bonaventure, A Defence of the Mendicants (selections), in From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought 100-1625, ed. Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, pp. 312-19. The references below are to section number. Bonaventure cites a number of authorities in his exposition, including Augustine, Jerome, Bede, Rabanus Maurus, Gregory the Great, and Bernard of Clairvaux.The apostolic way of life is described as consisting in “models of perfection,” and therefore imposing “no obligation on those...

Acton’s Sam Gregg looks at the plight of Middle Eastern Christians in ‘Business flight will hurt Arabs,’ mentary published today in The Australian. Their plight is also the Middle East’s loss as the continuing out migration of Christians saps the economic vitality and entrepreneurial spirit of the region. Sam asks: So where are these Christian migrants going? The vast majority are migrating mercially oriented, business-friendly countries such as the US and Australia. In 2002, 63 per cent of Arab-Americans identified...

Ray Nothstine’s mentary on the the ethanol boom and its impact on the poor was published today in the Christian Science Monitor as, “The unintended consequences of the ethanol quick fix.” His timely article was also picked up by a slew of other newspapers and Web sites, including the Bakersfield Californian, the Fresno Bee and the Atlantic City Press. ...

I wrote a ments explaining why John Edwards’ recent poverty tour may serve as good rhetoric but, in the end, demonstrates very poor economic thinking. His ideas essentially represent the failed “war on poverty” initiatives that came out of LBJ’s “Great Society” foolishness. It’s a 2007 remix of a few old, tired, played out ideologies. The programs didn’t work in the 70s and 80s and they won’t work if Edwards es president. Edwards wants to raise the minimum wage to...

In the July issue of Christianity Today, White House spokesman Tony Snow offers a moving account of his struggle with colon cancer in “Cancer’s Unexpected Blessings.” Snow, who delivered the keynote speech at the 2001 Acton Annual Dinner, wrote this in response to CT’s question about “the spiritual lessons he has been learning through the ordeal.”: The moment you enter the Valley of the Shadow of Death, things change. You discover that Christianity is not something doughy, passive, pious, and...

Garbling difficult (and sometimes easy) words is mon and often humorous occurrence among children, as any parent can attest. My daughter did so serendipitously the other day, pronouncing Acton’s film production as “The Call of the Entre-manure.” As chance would have it—and as those who have seen the film or its trailer know—one of the documentary’s stories is about a dairy farmer who turned his animals’ waste into a profitable business. I wondered if Brad Morgan might like to take...

I was thinking this morning about the moral calculus that goes into discussions about climate change policy. It’s the case that for any even or action, there are an infinite number of causes (conditions that are necessary but not sufficient for the event to occur). But only a finite number of causes, perhaps in most cases a single cause, can have any moral relevance. For a cause to be a moral cause, it has to have be related to a...

For some reason, I had never thought about what pro-life socialist policies might look like. But today, Jim Wallis’s Sojourner’s blog covered a Los Angeles Times story about a strategy shift in the Democratic party to support a House bill “designed not only to prevent unwanted pregnancies, but also to encourage women who do conceive to carry to term.” Passed last week in the House with strong bi-partisan support, the bill provides millions of federal dollars to: • Counsel more...