Patriots’ memorates the opening battles of the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. It is officially celebrated in Massachusetts and Maine, and is now observed on the third Monday in April to allow for a three day weekend. Patriots’ Day is also the day upon which the Boston Marathon is held and the Boston Red Sox are always scheduled to play at home with the only official A.M. start in Major League Baseball. My Patriots’ Day...

In this piece John Pisciotta, a professor of economics at Baylor University, offers a number of sound reasons for getting rid of earmarks on appropriations bills, including their tendency to invite corruption. “Those who seek them are tempted to skirt the law to win favor with a legislator so as to be graced with an earmark,” he writes. “We should not be surprised that a handful of former members of Congress now receive free room and board at federal prisons.”...

Sam Gregg marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Alexis de Tocqueville whose great work “Democracy in America” warned about the dangers of fortable servility. “The American Republic,” Tocqueville wrote, “will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” Read mentary at the Acton website ment on it here. ...

This year April 6th marked the 15th anniversary of beginning of the genocide in Rwanda. Catherin Claire Larson, a senior writer and editor at Prison Fellowship Ministries, has written a new book called As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation from Rwanda, which focuses on how such wounds opened up fifteen years ago are being healed today. (Larson’s book is inspired by the award-winning film of the same name, which debuted in April 2008. Comment carried an interview with Laura Waters...

It is our pleasure to e guest ramblings on the PowerBlog, and we are happy to feature this contribution from Catherine Claire Larson, author of As We Forgive, the subject of this week’s PBR question. I wasn’t able to include it all in my book, but I’ve been greatly impressed by the groups which are wedding reconciliation work with micro-enterprise. World Relief has an essential oil business that is enabling Hutu and Tutsi to work in munity, Indego has their...

One of the more interesting discussions at last week’s Heritage Foundation Resource Bank meeting in Los Angeles was the “Hollywood Conversations” session with screenwriter and novelist Andrew Klavan and Lionel Chetwynd, a writer, producer and director. Both men pleaded with the gathering of conservatives — social, political, economic — to stop beating up on Hollywood ad nauseam and to do more to support good work by conservatives. Here’s the gist of the argument from a recent Klavan interview on Big...

Kevin Allen, host of The Illumined Heart podcast on Ancient Faith Radio, interviews writer, attorney, and college professor Chris Banescu, an Orthodox Christian, about the economic, moral and spiritual issues surrounding the market economy. Kevin asks: Does the capitalist system serve “the best interests of Christians living the life of the Beatitudes?” Listen to Chris Banescu on Orthodox Christianity and Capitalism: [audio: Read “A Primer on Capitalism” on Chris’ personal Web site. He is also the author of two articles...

And if bed nets or any other foreign interventions are to do significant and lasting good, charitable enterprises will need to rediscover the importance of subsidiarity, of humans on the ground in relationship with other human beings, as opposed to government-to-government aid transfers that often do more harm than good. One person who speaks forcefully to this issue is Rwandan Anglican Bishop John Rucyahana … Read More… Saturday is World Malaria Day, which each year draws attention to the scourge...

Catherine Claire Larson’s book As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation from Rwanda is an exploration of forgiveness and reconciliation in the years following the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Fifteen years ago this month, a plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi was shot down on a return trip from Tanzania, sparking widespread ethnic violence across the country. By the time the civil war was declared over on July 18, 1994, between 800,000 and 1 million Rwandans had been killed....

The Detroit News published a column yesterday that I wrote about Catholic identity and the controversies sparked by President Obama’s visit to Georgetown and his planned speech at Notre Dame. National Review Online also published a variation of the same column last week under the title, The Catholic Identity Crisis. Here’s the Detroit News column: President Barack Obama made an ment on economics during his April 14 speech at Georgetown University. “We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile...