For today and today only, you can watch Episode 2 of For the Life of the World: Letters to the Exiles for FREE over at Flannel.org. Produced by the Acton Institute and spread across seven episodes, the series seeks to examine the bigger picture of Christianity’s role in culture, society, and the world. Episode 2 focuses specifically on the Economy of Love, and the grand mystery we find therein. As host Evan Koons concludes: “Family is the first and foundational...

Next year will mark the 40th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon and the end of America’s involvement in Vietnam. Uwe Siemon-Netto, a German, and former journalist for United Press International, covered much of the conflict in Vietnam. He has a new and excellent book titled, Triumph of the Absurd: A Reporter’s Love for the Abandoned People of Vietnam. Siemon-Netto is a Lutheran theologian and his extensive background in journalism and theology gives him tremendous credibility in discussing today’s media...

Economics, at first glance, doesn’t seem very…well…sexy. It’s all about numbers, right? How the stock market is doing, how much people are willing to spend on stuff they need or want, whether or not people have jobs. That’s economics, right? As the Rev. Robert Sirico is fond of saying, economics is fundamentally about human action. If this is true, then economics applies to sexual activity as well. In the following video (from the Austin Institute), today’s sexual landscape is examined...

Should we always take the side of the individual consumer? That’s the question Rod Dreher asks in a recent post on “Amazon and the Cost of Consumerism.” It’s a good question, one that people have been asking for centuries. The best answer that has been provided—as is usually the case when es to economic questions—was provided by the nineteenth-century French journalist Frédéric Bastiat. Bastiat argues, rather brilliantly, that, consumption is the great end and purpose of political economy; that good...

As I was poring over the morning news the other day, it seemed to me that every few days there is another water crisis somewhere; whether it’s California’s drought, or more recently the controversial decision in which the Detroit panies shut off the water supply to over 15,000 customers. But are we really looking at water regulation, appropriation, and the morality of shutting water off in the correct light? Let’s start with some of the basics: Water is essential for...

Over at his blog, Peter Boettke writes, “The idle rich are never really idle in a free market economy.” Now while we might want to distinguish between the rich and their riches, could it be that even in their consumption, conspicuous or otherwise, the rich are contributing to a rising tide that lifts all boats? Wesley Gant makes that related case over at Values & Capitalism: “Is It Possible to Waste Money?” Gant seems to conclude that it isn’t possible...

In a gutsy, thoughtful article attheAmerican Thinker , Danusha V. Goska describes her intellectual journey from a family of card-carrying Communists to discovering she wanted to spend time with people “building, cultivating, and establishing, something that they loved.” There’s a lot to mull over in Goska’s piece, but it was her discovery of a moral and religious framework that struck me. Rather than a “nihilistic void” that had been her life, Goska encountered people whose faith informed their actions in...

Elise Hilton has been writing a good deal lately about our manufactured border crisis, and last week Al Kresta, host of Kresta in the Afternoon on the Ave Maria Radio Network, asked Elise to join him on his show to discuss the human tide currently engulfing the southern border of the United States. They discuss the response – or lack thereof – of the Obama Administration to the crisis, the underlying causes of the problem, and how the failures of...

What just happened with Obamacare? In a two-to-one decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit dealt a serious blow to Obamacare by ruling the government may not provide subsidies to encourage people to buy health insurance on the new marketplaces run by the federal government. What did the court decide? Section 36B of the Internal Revenue Code, enacted as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) makes tax credits available as a...

Last week was a busy one, news-wise, and this may have slipped by you. Suddenly, 4.5 million people in the 5 U.S. territories (American Somoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands) are now exempt from Obamacare. Just like that. What’s the story? Obamacare costs too darn much, and insurance providers were fleeing the U.S. territories, leaving many without insurance or at least affordable insurance. These territories have spent the last two years begging to get...