Every year about 400,000 children spend time in our nation’s foster care system, with roughly 100,000 eligible for adoption. Yet despite this urgent need for parents, note Sarah Torre and Ryan T. Anderson, “various states have adopted policies that would require faith-based providers to place children with same-sex couples, in violation of some agencies’ deeply held beliefs that children deserve a mom and a dad—effectively forcing these agencies out of adoption and foster care service.” In a refreshing change from...

When es to free trade, critics insistthat it hurts the American worker — kicking them while they’re down andslowly eroding munal fabric of mom-and-pops, longstanding trades, and factory towns. Whether es from a politician, labor union, or corporate crony, the messaging is alwaysthe same: Ignore thelong-term positive effects, and focus ontheCapitalist’s conquest of the Other. Trouble is, the basic logic of such thoughtleads straight back to the Self. I recently made this point as it pertains to immigration, arguing thatsuch...

June is a busy month for the Supreme Court. The Daily Signal has given us a tidy round-up of seven cases to keep an eye on. Reed v. Town of Gilbert: This is a free speech case.The Good News Community Church in Gilbert, Ariz., uses signage to promote events at the church. The town has codes regarding signage, and the church says they are not fair. For example, the church is allowed to put signs for only 12 hours before...

In this short video, Allan Carlson of the Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society describes the importance and centrality of the family to a health society. Families that work together in some endeavor tend to be healthier, are able to care for themselves and thus e the foundation of a sound economy and society. ...

For the past hundred years, mon worry about population was that we’d soon have more people than the Earth could sustain. Today, we have the opposite concern: In the near future, there may not be enough people to support an increasingly aging population. To simply maintain its current population, a country needs the average number of children born to women in their country (over her lifetime) to be 2.1. Few industrialized e close to that replacement rate: Ireland (2.0), Australia...

On June 18, 2015, Pope Francis will issue the encyclical,Laudato si’. Here are some answers to questions people who aren’t Catholic—like me—may have about the document: What is an encyclical? The term encyclical (from the Greek egkyklios, kyklos meaning a circle) refers to a circular letter, that is, a letter that gets circulated to a particular group. A papal encyclical is a letter written by the Pope to a particular audience of patriarchs, primates, archbishops, and bishops of the Catholic...

“New York Times writer David Brooks’ new book, On the Road to Character, examines what it takes to create a virtuous life,” says Elise Hilton in this week’s Acton Commentary. “The author’s central question: Does a person of character focus solely on building on one’s strengths or does he confront and improve his weaknesses?” It is an interesting topic for a man who makes his living writing pithy, sometimes political, columns in a very secular newspaper. While Brooks is Jewish,...

I was reading through Abraham Kuyper’s inaugural speech at the founding of the Free University in Amsterdam, in which he lays out his vision of “sphere sovereignty,” and this passage struck me as particularly noteworthy. It is reminiscent of the appeal that Aslan makes to the “Deeper Magic” wrought at the dawn of creation in Narnia (and by which, incidentally, he es the tyrannical claims to absolute sovereignty made by the White Witch): Sphere sovereignty defending itself against State sovereignty:...

The summer of 2014 saw an overwhelming amount of children making their way, illegally, across the southern U.S. border. Thousands of children and adolescents overwhelmed the Border Patrol and social service agencies. Are we gearing up to see the same type of event this summer? It’s beginning to look that way. We are not nearly at the numbers we were last year, but it looks like we are in the opening stages. We had two groups equal a little over...

Boko Haram, the militant Islamist group in Nigeria, is infamous for kidnapping girls. Last year, everyone from Wall Street to Hollywood got in on the [ineffective] #BringBackOurGirls social media campaign after Boko Haram kidnapped dozens of Christian school girls. But what about the boys? Boko Haram has a pseudo-military arm. Which means they need soldiers. And they can’t recruit legitimately. That means they kidnap boys. Many are themselves victims of terror: child soldiers, abducted from their families and forced to...