This week we feature a post by Steve Bishop who is involved in full-time Christian ministry as a husband, father and in teaching mathematics and forensic science to post-16s. He blogs at and maintains the neo-Calvinist/Kuyperian website www.allofliferedeemed.co.uk Follow him on twitter @stevebishopuk Mind maps have in recent years been associated with Tony Buzan. However, they go back as far as the third century and were – or so it is alleged – first used by Porphyry of Tyros. Mind...

Today marks the 25th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s stirring speech in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. Against the advice of the State Department, the National Security Council and the ranking U.S. diplomat in Berlin, the President challenged Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Communist Party, to take his glasnost policy one step further with the demolition of the Berlin Wall. The speech, which forecasted the wall’s 1989 destruction, remains one of the most iconic moments of Reagan’s presidency and a...

A roundup at Notes on Arab Orthodoxy paints a grim picture for Christians — and clashing Islamic sects — in Syria. It’s a gut-wrenching account of kidnappings, torture and beheadings. One report begins with this line: “Over 40 young men (including a couple of doctors) from the Wadi area, were killed by the bearded men who are eager to give us democracy.” The article also links to a report in Agenzia Fides, which interviewed a Greek-Catholic bishop: The picture for...

Donald Trump's tagline: "You're fired."Last week I raised the question of whether being a Christian businessperson means you do some things differently, and particularly whether some of these things that are done differently have to do with terminating an employee. Here’s a snip of what Kenman Wong and Scott Rae say in their recent book, Business for the Common Good: Although panies may take on certain employees as an act of benevolence, it is not the norm. Employees are bound...

A recent editorial in the New York Times claims that during the 1980s leveraged buyouts “contributed significantly to the growth of the e gap, moving wealth from the middle class to the top end.” First Things editor R.R. Reno explains why the real story is plicated, more interesting, and explains much more than e inequality: The upper middle class world responded to the leveraged buyout revolution by upping mitments to education and economically oriented self-discipline. The old white-collar social contract...

Citizens of North Dakota will be voting today on an amendment to the state’s constitution that supporters say will guarantee religious freedom: Measure 3 is worded this way: “Government may not burden a person’s or religious organization’s religious liberty.” Its supporters call it the Religious Liberty Restoration amendment; they say it’s needed because of a 22-year-old U.S. Supreme Court decision they believe has put limits on religious freedom. “What this amendment is attempting to do is to restore that level...

Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg reviews America’s Spiritual Capital by Nicholas Capaldi and T. R. Malloch (St Augustine’s Press, 2012) for The University Bookman. … Capaldi and Malloch are—refreshingly—unabashed American exceptionalists. One of this book’s strengths is the way that it brings to light a critical element of that exceptionalism through the medium of spiritual capital. Part of the American experiment is mitment to modernity—but a modernity several times removed from that pioneered by the likes of the French revolutionaries,...

Writing on The American Spectator website, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg looks at the strange notion of European fiscal “austerity” even as more old continent economies veer toward the abyss. Is America far behind? Needless to say, Greece is Europe’s poster child for reform-failure. Throughout 2011, the Greek parliament passed reforms that diminished regulations that applied to many professions in the economy’s service sector. But as two Wall Street Journal journalists demonstrated one year later, “despite the change in the...

On National Review Online, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg demolishes the left’s knee-jerk explanation for labor union decline, which blames “the machinations of conservative intellectuals, free-market-inclined governments, and businesses who, over time, have successfully worked to diminish organized labor, thereby crushing the proverbial ‘little guy.'” Gregg writes: “The truth, however, is rather plex. One factor at work is economic globalization. Businesses fed up with unions who think that their industry should be immune petition are now in a position to...

John Luther is pierced for Jenny's transgressions.An essay of mine on the wonderful and difficult BBC series “Luther” is up over at the Comment magazine website, “Get Your Hands Dirty: The Vocational Theology of Luther.” In this piece I reflect on DCI John Luther’s “overriding need to protect other people from injustice and harm, and even sometimes the consequences of their own sin and guilt,” and how that fits in with the Christian (and particularly Lutheran) doctrine of vocation. Indeed,...