Children are not the property of the state: A Christian family from Germany have been granted political asylum in the US after facing the threat of prison for home schooling their children. Uwe and Hannelore Romeike, who are evangelical Christians, were forced to flee Germany as they wished to educate their five children at home. Home schooling is still illegal in Germany under laws introduced during the Nazi era. The German law means that parents who choose to home school...

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the ex-president of Haiti who has lived lavishly in exile as a guest of the South African government for the past six years, recently announced he was ready to go back and help Haiti rebuild from its catastrophic earthquake. Allowing the former despot Aristide — a long time proponent of liberation theology — back into the country would be the worst thing we could do to Haiti right now. The American government must resist any move by Aristide...

Writers on this blog have pointed to a lot of examples of passion when es to charity and public policy. But what can passion, or maybe just a passion, look like? The Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina Andre Bauer made ment saying government assistance programs for the poor was akin to “feeding stray animals.” I’m not highlighting ment just to bash Bauer and you can watch the clip where he clarifies ments. He continues in a follow up interview by...

The current issue of Touchstone magazine features an impressive cover essay by Douglas Farrow, Professor of Christian Thought at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. In “The Audacity of the State,” Farrow uses the biblical Ichabod motif to examine the crumbling pillars of the family and church, which when properly respected form critical foundations for a flourishing society. In their place, writes Farrow, is the “savior state,” which “presents itself as the people’s guardian, as the guarantor of the citizen’s well-being....

From Econstories.tv: In Fear the Boom and Bust, John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek, two of the great economists of the 20th e back to life to attend an economics conference on the economic crisis. Before the conference begins, and at the insistence of Lord Keynes, they go out for a night on the town and sing about why there’s a “boom and bust” cycle in modern economies and good reason to fear it. Lyrics sample (written by John...

Occasional Acton Institute collaborator and theologian Eduardo Echeverria has a new book out: “Dialogue of Love”: Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic Ecumenist. I haven’t gotten my hands on a copy yet, but the buzz—from some pretty respectable folks—is good. To wit, Francis Beckwith of Baylor University: This is an amazing book. Professor Echeverria, artfully and persuasively, shows how the Catholic and Reformed traditions can better understand, as well as learn from, each other. This book is a model on how...

This week’s mentary: The left is in trouble in Latin America. Sebastián Piñera’s recent election as Chile’s first elected center-right president in decades owes much to the inability of the center-left coalition that governed Chile after 1990 to rejuvenate itself. Yet across Latin America there is, as the Washington Post’s Jackson Diel perceptively observes, a sense that the left’s decade of dominance is unraveling. Future historians may trace the beginning of this decline to the refusal of Honduras’s Congress, Supreme...

This week’s mentary: As 2010 unfolds, many countries are confronting a public deficit crisis of disturbing proportions. Since 2008, countless politicians have underscored that a cavalier attitude to debt on the part of Main St. and Wall St. contributed significantly to the recent financial crisis. It’s therefore ironic to observe these contemporary preachers of thrift plunging developed economies into an abyss of public liabilities. In 2009, for example, the Obama Administration spent more money on new programs in nine months...

In last night’s State of the Union address, President mented that “even though banks on Wall Street are lending again, they’re mostly lending to panies. Financing remains difficult for small-business owners across the country, even though they’re making a profit.” He then offered some of our tax dollars to help: “So tonight, I’m proposing that we take $30 billion of the money Wall Street banks have repaid and use it to munity banks give small businesses the credit they need...

This week’s reappointment vote for Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has created some strange bedfellows in Washington. A muddled middle of Republicans and Democrats supports the Keynesian’s reappointment, but the real odd couples are among the opposition. For different if overlapping reasons, free market proponents and far-left figures such as democratic-socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont are both convinced that Bernanke has done much to hurt our economy, particularly those in the bottom half of our economy. Desmond Lachman of The Enterprise...