A਋it of green conservative politics for your Friday – You’ll see why in a minute. First, read this blog post by the Sierra Club on Linc Chafee (Republican, RI), and then this: Meet Wayne Gilchrest, Republican member of the House of Representatives, First Congressional District of Maryland, former house painter, teacher, Vietnam veteran — and past, present and future canoeist who has yet to find himself up that well-known proverbial creek without a paddle, though he must think at times...

Mortgage foreclosure rates soared 53 percent in pared with a year earlier, and many people who were eager to buy a house with low “teaser” interest rates and creative financing are in trouble. Acton Senior Fellow in Economics Jennifer Roback Morse expects new calls for goverment oversight of the mortgage industry, which is already highly regulated. A better idea, she suggests, would be for buyers to examine their motives for acquiring real estate with gimmicky loans and take some responsibility...

Courtesy of today’s Zondervan>To The es this announcement, replete with extensive related links: The MacLaurin Institute is sponsoring a conference at the University of Minnesota through tomorrow exploring what it means for people to demonstrate a Christian perspective as they live their lives at the interfaces of three “worlds” — natural, engineered, and human. It will also study how Christian virtues ought to influence public and private policies regarding the interaction of these worlds. Here are a couple of the...

NBC Nightly News has long had a special feature titled, “The Fleecing of America,” which investigates various instances wasteful spending by government officials. To get a visual clue about the massive size and diversity of the federal budget, check out “Death and Taxes”, the 2007 edition, “a representational graph of the federal discretionary budget. The amount of money that is spent at the discretion of your elected representatives in Congress. Basically, your federal e taxes.” The website also notes, “Don’t...

The debate has not been confined to Catholic circles, but it has been concentrated there. Many (most?) American Catholic moral theologians of the post-Vatican II era have been enamored with one form or another of “proportionalism,” a theory of morality that eschews the traditional Catholic focus on the “intrinsic” goodness or badness of human acts. (Bad acts must be avoided always.) Proportionalism’s critics have accused its adherents of being simply consequentialists by another name. Consequentialism, which permits using evil means...

In a way, the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford recognizes a fact that Ron Sider has written on and I have thought about for a long time. In “A New Take on Tithing,” Claude Rosenberg & Tim Stone write: Too often, individuals make decisions about how much money to donate to charitable causes on an ad hoc basis. As a result, many people give less money than they can actually afford. If the affluent contributed as much to nonprofits...

Earlier this month Forum 18 published an article that examined whether the establishment of a law regarding religion at a national level would be a positive step toward ending the sometimes arbitrary and uneven treatment of religious freedom issues throughout the country. In “Would a religion law help promote religious freedom?” Magda Hornemann writes, “For many years, some religious believers and experts both inside and outside China have advocated the creation of prehensive religion law through the National People’s Congress,...

Allow me to summarize the message of outgoing UN General Secratary Kofi Annan’s speech to the General Assembly yesterday (HT: International Civic Engagement): “The United Nations is the way, the truth and the life. No es to utopia but through it.” You pare the text of Annan’s speech to see if I’ve gotten it right, and then contrast my summary with another source. ...

The Summer 2006 issue of Religion & Liberty is now available. This issue focuses on the relationship between virtue and success. Looking at this question from several different perspectives – from an economic to a Biblical point of view – we convey that a virtuous society will best satisfy the requirements for liberty and free, and effective, markets. Inside This Issue: The Economy of Trust: R&L interviewed Kenneth Arrow, a Nobel Prize and National Medal for Science winner, on the...

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Beliefnet, in conjunction with Sojourners, is hosting a blog based on Jim Wallis’ book, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It. One of the key features in the blog’s short tenure to date is a discussion between Jim Wallis and Ralph Reed, former leader of the Christian Coalition. Jim says that Ralph is his “first dialogue partner on God’s Politics,” so perhaps we can expect more...