5/24/2010 – Jennifer Marshall –
It’s hard to imagine the unemployment rate rising steeply for decades without public outcry. But that’s exactly what’s happened in the case of another significant indicator: the unwed birth rate.
Hardly anyone noticed this spring when new data showed 40% of all births are to unmarried mothers. That’s way up from 7% in the mid-1960s, when a young White House appointee named Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to sound the alarm. [Read more…]
5/20/2010 – Stuart Schwartz –
Where professors rule, life is cruel.
That is the bottom line for the average American in this, the transformative age of the president the New York Times and Washington Post has called “Professor” Obama, who “schools” the ignorant at home and abroad. Never before have so many with so little humility gathered together in our government, each believing he “is the smartest guy in the room.”
This is an administration stuffed with academics. And not just any academic: These are educators from elite universities, the kind of experts prized by a political and media elite seeking confirmation of a worldview that expects, notes the Washington Examiner, “the rest of us … to shut up and do as we are told.” [Read more…]
4/30/2010 – Ken Connor –
“Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.” Alexis de Tocqueville
In his treatise, The Christian Manifesto, published in 1981, Francis Schaeffer suggests that the gradual shift away from a Judeo-Christian (or at least a Creationist) worldview towards a materialistic view of reality has broad sociological and governmental implications for western society. His is an interesting thesis to ponder in light of a recent article in USA Today discussing religion and the Millennial Generation.
The article cites a recent survey conducted by Lifeway Christian Resources, which reveals that Millennials (defined as Americans born approximately between 1980 and 1995) are distancing themselves from traditional religious forms in favor of a personally-defined, nebulous kind of “spirituality.” These individuals are less likely to pray, they don’t read the Bible, and they don’t go to church. Among the 65% who identify themselves as Christian, “many are either mushy Christians or Christians in name only. . . . Most are just indifferent.” Theological indifference may seem like no big deal in an age where moral relativism and the cult of the individual reign, but it’s worth considering Schaeffer’s argument that – whether we realize it or not – our understanding of religion and its role in society has a direct impact on our politics. [Read more…]
5/18/2010 – Bruce Walker –
The left pretends to be the biggest champion of free speech. When the New York Times wrote articles about how our government was tracking the activities of terrorists, journalistic behavior which directly endangered the lives of Americans by providing intelligence information to those terrorists who are at war with us, the sanctimonious left insisted that this newspaper was simply exercising its constitutional right of free speech and free press. [Read more…]
5/17/2010 – Matthew Vadum –
In order to distract from the grave fiscal crisis caused by Greece’s cradle-to-grave socialism, Greek socialist prime minister George Papandreou is threatening to sue American banks.
Like his father before him who was also prime minister, Papandreou is the leader of the political party PASOK, which is the Panhellenic Socialist Movement. He is also president of the Socialist International. (The Socialist International’s affiliate in the U.S. is a group called Democratic Socialists of America, which in turn in closely tied to the Congressional Progressive Caucus).
“Greece will look into the past and see how things went,” Papandreou said. “There are similar investigations going on in other countries and in the United States. This is where I think, yes, the financial sector, I hear the words fraud and lack of transparency. So yes, yes, there is great responsibility here.” [Read more…]
5/15/2010 – Hilary White –
In an address to assembled social and pastoral care workers in Fatima, Portugal yesterday, Pope Benedict identified abortion and the pressure for gay “marriage” as among the most “insidious and dangerous challenges that today confront the common good,” and expressed his “deep appreciation” for those who fight for the rights of the unborn.
Benedict hailed “all those social and pastoral initiatives” that combat the “socio-economic and cultural mechanisms which lead to abortion, and are openly concerned to defend life and to promote the reconciliation and healing of those harmed by the tragedy of abortion.”
These “initiatives aimed at protecting the essential and primary values of life, beginning at conception, and of the family based on the indissoluble marriage between a man and a woman, help to respond to some of today’s most insidious and dangerous threats to the common good. [Read more…]
5/14/2010 – J.R. Dunn –
The Ottomans had an interesting method of assuring political stability. The sprawling empire operated on a system in which “millets,” distinct ethnic and religious groups, were allowed to oversee their own internal affairs while giving absolute loyalty to the sultan and his government. Every now and then a millet would be ordered to pack up and head out for a new home, at times at the opposite end of the imperium, amid new neighbors — sometimes the original residents, sometimes other refugees — of alien origins, ethnicity, and religious belief. Christians among Muslims, Catholics among Orthodox, Bulgarians among Turks, Circassians among Arabs…the variations were nearly endless. [Read more…]
5/11/2010 – Chuck Colson –
Is the U.S. Flag Offensive?
The right of free speech is guaranteed by the Constitution. The right to not be offended is not. But guess which right trumped the other in a California school last week.
The two students were minding their own business—just sitting at a table on a school break, chatting with their friends. And then the vice principal of the school walked up to the boys—and ordered them to remove their American flag bandanas. Their T-shirts also featured the Stars and Stripes. The boys were told to turn them inside out, so the flags wouldn’t show.
The boys—who often wore these kind of clothes—refused, and were sent to the principal’s office. There, they were told their T-shirts were “incendiary,” and would provoke fights. [Read more…]
5/11/2010 – Thomas Sowell –
One of the many fashionable notions that have caught on among some of the intelligentsia is that old people have “a duty to die” rather than become a burden to others.
This is more than just an idea discussed around a seminar table. Already the government-run medical system in Britain is restricting what medications or treatments it will authorize for the elderly. Moreover, it seems almost certain that similar attempts to contain runaway costs will lead to similar policies when American medical care is taken over by the government.[Read more…]
5/10/2010 – Mark D. Tooley –
The old Religious Left has long championed virtual open borders and slammed national sovereignty as idolatrous. Now the new Evangelical Left is chiming in with its own sentimentalization of illegal immigration, identifying Jesus Christ Himself as an illegal immigrant.
“We are exiles who follow an alien, undocumented, migrant Messiah,” insisted Debra Dean Murphy, a religion professor at United Methodist affiliated West Virginia Wesleyan College. Her recent column was carried by Jim Wallis’ Sojourners and illustrates the merging thought of old Religious Left and new Evangelical Left. [Read more…]