There’s a perceptive article by Christopher Levenick on the Weekly Standard’s site. It’s titled “Monkish: What the increase of monastic vocations in Italy could mean for European secularism”. First, the surpising data: Italy […] is often viewed as a case study in secularization. Yet across the peninsula, weekly attendance at Catholic Mass has been steadily climbing for two decades. In 1980, roughly 35 percent of Italians regularly attended the Mass; by 2000 that figure had climbed to nearly 50 percent....

Joe Knippenberg raises three issues with respect to my critique of the faith-based initiative (here and here). He writes first, “any activity that depends upon money is potentially corrupting, whether the source is governmental or private…. Why governmental money is different from private in this regard isn’t clear to me.” I agree that the potential for corruption is present in both cases, but the immediate constituency differs from private to public funds. For the former, the donors are the immediate...

Here’s an interesting story–Apple Corps is suing Apple Computer for breach of contract. You probably recognize the first Apple as pany owned by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and the widows of the other two Beatles. Since 1991, Apple Corps has had a deal with Apple Computer: in essence, the pany agrees to stay out of puter and munications business, and pany agrees to stay out of the music business–technically, each has agreed to keep its trademark out of the others...

It was a major topic of discussion during the era of corporate scandals a couple years ago, but the issue of pensation still pops up in the news from time to time, and it remains a problem with which serious thinkers continue to grapple. Harvard’s Lucian Bebchuk and Berkeley’s Jesse Fried started one important strand of the discussion when they published Pay Without Performance in 2004. (Robert Kennedy reviewed it for Markets & Morality [available to subscribers]). In brief, Bebchuk...

Kofi Akosah in Accra, Ghana, writes in the latest Campaign for Fighting Diseases newsletter about the prospects for the use of DDT in fighting malaria in his home country. He first describes the devastation that the disease wreaks: “More than 17 million of Ghana’s 20 million people are infected by malaria every year, costing the nation a colossal 850 million cedis (US$94 million) for treatment alone.” He continues, “Those infected by malaria are in and out of hospital and unable...

mentary last week on the situation of the Silver Ring Thing has occasioned some conversation on the Blog (here, here, here, and here). The consensus on the faith-based initiative seems to be that, in the words of William L. Anderson, they “were pointing out at the beginning that this was a bad idea, and that taking the state’s money ultimately would mean that the state would be interfering with the larger mission of these religious groups.” Contrariwise, Joseph Knippenberg, who...

If you haven’t seen it yet, I mend the film I Am David with Jim Caviezel and Ben Tibber. It is about a young boy, David, who escapes from a Bulgarian Prison Camp and undertakes a journey northward to Denmark. It is based on the children’s novel North to Freedom by Ann Holm. The movie contrasts the horror munist prison camp life with daily life of people in free societies. Normal everyday interactions of young David with a wealthy Italian...

It has been a bit of a mystery over the last few months, as an anonymous group of developers had been purchasing up a series of properties near downtown Grand Rapids. The investigative work of the local TV news turned up the plans for the group to end up with a 41-acre area that runs along the Grand River through the heart of downtown. Currently, the area is mostly made up of unused manufacturing facilities, abandoned buildings, and generally unproductive...

A snippet from Ecumenical News International: Presbyterians invest $1 million in church ‘bank’ that helps poor New York (ENI). The Presbyterian Church (USA) has invested US$1 million in Oikocredit, an organization established by the World Council of Churches that assists people in poor countries start small businesses. The investment is the largest in Oikocredit over more than a decade, the church announced earlier this week, making the 2.4-million-member US denomination the second-largest investor in the institution set up in 1975....

“Immigration creates wealth,” says Larry Kudlow: Part of the immigration problem is simply Mexico’s inadequate growth and lack of economic opportunity. The country is growing at about 3 percent a year, but it ought to be growing at six to ten percent. Our southern neighbor ought to be the “Mexican Tiger,” but continues to be the “Mexican Chihuahua.” He also cites and explicates a column by Linda Chavez in The Washington Times, “illustrating what great entrepreneurs and small-business owners Hispanics...