Nicholas Wapshott’s new book Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage offers a fresh look at the political relationship and friendship of two profound leaders in the late 20th Century. While the biographical information is not new for those who have read extensive biographies of Reagan and Thatcher, the author examines some of the deep disagreements the two leaders had in foreign policy. While there were arguments between the two over the Falklands War, Grenada, sanctions, and nuclear disarmament,...

The PowerBlog has been selected as one of the host blogs for Chuck Colson’s blog tour, promoting his new book, The Faith. It’s an honor to be included among other luminaries of the blogosphere like The Dawn Treader, , and Tall Skinny Kiwi. A bit about the book: In their powerful new book The Faith, Charles Colson and Harold Fickett identify the unshakable tenets of the faith that Christians have believed through the centuries—truths that offer a ground for faith...

Don Surber thinks so, and it’s hard to argue his point when you see stories like this: More than 400 Canadians in the full throes of a heart attack or other cardiac emergency have been sent to the United States because no hospital can provide the lifesaving care they require here. Most of the heart patients who have been sent south since 2003 typically show up in Ontario hospitals, where they are given clot-busting drugs. If those drugs fail to...

OSD’s Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China has some illuminating – and somewhat staggering – insight on the current state of affairs with respect to China’s environment and how it influences their national strategic policies. It’s a fascinating look at how the munist nation is dealing with the realities of ing a global superpower. Under the heading “Developments in China’s Grand Strategy, Security Strategy, and Military Strategy” the document includes this bullet:...

From a CT interview in 1995 by Michael Cromartie: Certain things which the market authorizes simply in terms of law are unchristian and ought not to be done. The big issue today has to do with the fidelity of marriages. The tendency now to leave your wife because you have an infatuation with a younger woman of tenderer flesh is an enormous temptation. It’s carnal, and it’s also easy to justify with all the solipsistic reasoning that we hear today....

Last week, I had the pleasure to attend one of the Acton Institute’s seminars here in Rome. Located at the campus of the Pontifical University of Regina Apostolorum, the seminar drew more than 100 religious and lay persons from all over the world. It was apparent that the topic was not only an interesting one, but also a personal one for many in the room. The presentations dealt with the papal encyclical Populorum Progressio forty years later. Asking the pertinent...

Founda study on sociobiology in The Economist (of all places). This passage on the development of liberal vice conservative tendencies was worth a chuckle: Dr Wilson and Dr Storm found several unexpected differences between the groups. Liberal teenagers always felt more stress than conservatives, but were particularly stressed if they could not decide for themselves whom they spent time with. Such choice, or the lack of it, did not change conservative stress levels. Liberals were also loners, spending a quarter...

Following up on our discussion of the Pew survey on the American religious landscape, I have a few thoughts as to what plagues American Protestantism, particularly of the evangelical variety, and it has to do precisely with the “catholicity” of Protestantism. To the extent that people are leaving Protestantism, or are searching for another denomination within the broadly Protestant camp, I think there are at least two connected precipitating causes. (A caveat: there are many, many individual and anecdotal exceptions...

Matt Stone asks the question: What do you think are some of the challenges that remain for Christian environmental theology? I am presuming here that, if you’re the sort of Christian that likes a blog like mine, you’re not the sort of Christian who needs to have the dots joined between Christian ethics, creation care and environmental theology. But where do we go beyond the basic joining of the dots? How much more remains to be done… [snip] Personally I...

There’s a lot of consternation, much of it justified, about the news that now 1% of the population of the United States is incarcerated. Especially noteworthy is parison of the rate of imprisonment with institutionalization in mental health facilities over the last century. But a breathless headline like this just cannot pass without ment: “Michigan is 1 of 4 states to spend more on prison than college.” Given the fact that policing, including imprisonment, is pretty clearly a legitimate function...