For many of us ladies, getting our nails done is a regular bit of pampering. We stop off at the local nail salon, grab a magazine and relax while someone paints our nails. We pay our $25 and off we go. We never, for one moment, consider the person doing our nails could be a slave. For those who study human trafficking, nail salons have long been held as a hotspot for trafficking victims. But for the average client, the...

Happy Mother’s Day weekend from Herman Bavinck, who poetically summarizes the work, beauty, and glory of motherhood in The Christian Family: [The wife and mother] organizes the household, arranges and decorates the home, and supplies the tone and texture of home life; with unequaled talent she magically transforms a cold room into a cozy place, transforms modest e into sizable capital, and despite all kinds of statistical predictions, she uses limited means to generate great things. Within the family she...

1. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson issued a presidential proclamation thatofficially established the first national Mother’s Day holiday to celebrate America’s mothers. Many individual states celebrated Mother’s Day before then, but it was not until Wilson lobbied Congress in 1914 that Mother’s Day was officially set on the second Sunday of every May. 2. President Wilson established Mother’s Day after years of lobbying by themother of the holiday, Anna Marie Jarvis and the World’s Sunday School Association. Anna Jarvis’ mother,...

Since the 1950s, the modern conservative movement has been marked by “fusionism”—a mix of various groups, most notably traditional conservatives and libertarians. For the next fifty years a conservative Christian and a secular libertarian (or vice versa) could often mon ground by considering how liberty lead to human flourishing. But for the past decade a different fusionist arrangement has been tried (or at least desired) which includes progressives and libertarians. Brink Lindsey coined the term “liberaltarians” in 2006 to describe...

As You Sow (AYS), a shareholder activist group, was rebuffed last month in a move to curtail the use of Abbott Laboratories’ genetically modified organisms in its Similac Soy Isomil infant formulas. The defeat of the resolution marks the third year Abbott shareholders voted down an AYS effort to limit and/or label GMO ingredients by significant margins. This year’s resolution reportedly garnered only 3 percent of the shareholder vote. Such nuisance resolutions fly in the face of the facts: GMOs...

Series Note: Jobs are one of the most important aspects of a morally functioning economy. They help us serve the needs of our neighbors and lead to human flourishing both for the individual and munities. Conversely, not having a job can adversely affect spiritual and psychological well-being of individuals and families. Because unemployment is a spiritual problem, Christians in America need to understand and be aware of the monthly data on employment. Each month highlight the latest numbers we need...

The work of mothers is some of the most remarkable work to behold.Family is the “school of life” and the “nursery of love,” as Herman Bavinck describes it, and in turn, thestewardship oflove and lifeinvolves far more than a simple setof tasks, chores, and responsibilities. Motherhood is indeedfar more than a “job,”as Rachel Lu recently reminded us. And yet, paring it to other occupations, we mightbegin to get a sense of how true that statementactually is. In a recent ad...

Don’t let the dirty boots and the beat-up cowboy hat fool you: Joel Salatin is not your average farmer. While he is a farmer (he owns and operates Polyface Farm), he has a lot to say about how we produce, distribute and eat food in our nation, and how practices in the West negatively impact the developing world. What each of these delegates said, each session I went to, was, “You Americans butt out. We don’t need your foreign aid....