I recently posted some thoughts at The Power Blog on “God’s Problem With Centralized Power”, which took a macro view of what I believe to be God’s clear disdain for mankind pursuing their own ends instead of His articulated purposes when es to how we organize munally. This time I want to highlight a specific, micro-level example of that same general idea. The story of Israel’s demand for a king inI Samuel 8contains so many relevant, interesting nuggets of insight...

The Obama Administration has stated that 106,000 people have managed to sign up for health care on the Healthcare.gov site, a site 3-1/2 years in the making. Both HHS Director Kathleen Sebelius and Deputy Chief Information Officer for the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Henry Cho, have been grilled by mittees as to the incredibly poor performance of the website. What exactly went wrong? NPR’s All Tech Considered breaks it down. There are two popular methods of software development....

How easy is it for a 33 year old man to buy Plan B for his 15 year old “girlfriend?” Not too hard at all. In fact, the folks in this video from Students for Life don’t bat an eye – even when he makes it clear how old he is and how young his “girlfriend” is. Keep in mind that there is no state in the U.S. where it is legal for a 33 year old to have sexual...

At the Values & Capitalism blog, Jacqueline Otto Isaacs reviews Jordan Ballor’s Get Your Hands Dirty. Isaacs explains how Ballor articulates a vision for the proper orientation for our lives: In his recent release, “Get Your Hands Dirty,” Jordan Ballor of the Acton Institute lays out a clear case for why Christians ought to have rightly ordered lives and what that might look like. While the book took shape around a collection of essays, this message was as hard to...

Yesterday I was reading an article about Obamacare in the Washington Post. . . Whether they know about that financial help is a different question, as many have had trouble using HealthCare.gov to figure out how much insurance would cost under the Affordable Care Act. And the study does not include information on whether those subsides would lead to lower premiums for shoppers buying in the health law’s new exchanges. “There’s no question that when people get better coverage it...

One of the profound realities of theology and ecclesiastical enclaves in which American Christians live is each tribal subculture views the world as if Christianity begins and ends with their tribe. Evangelicals are a great example of this trend. Some evangelicals write as if they are the only Christians doing God’s work in the world. For example, Joy Allmond recently wrote a perplexing article about New York City asking “Is New York City on the Brink of a Great Awakening?”...

Even though the author of this essay in Catholic World Report is careful to make distinctions, this would seem to be the choice: Thomas Aquinas or Ron Paul. It is, in fact, how the indispensable Real Clear Religion website framed the debate this morning. pare a religion with an intellectual and moral tradition that goes back thousands of years with a quasi-political movement that is more known for what it is against than what is for is worse paring apples...

An exceedingly honest woman called into an Austin, Texas, radio talk show, KLBJ, to discuss why she chooses not to work. She, her husband and three children rely on tax dollars for shelter, utilities and food. She admits that her parents did not work either, and that free money and programs were offered all the time. And what’s wrong with that? [product sku=1177] ...

The Catholic Dioceses of Pittsburgh and Erie, along with several nonprofit groups, have won a preliminary injunction against implementing the HHS mandate. U.S. District Judge Arthur J. Schwab granted an injunction in favor of these organizations. The injunction allows them to continue to offer insurance that doesn’t include contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs while litigation continues. Without the injunction, the insurance administrators for the organizations — though not the dioceses themselves — would have had to start providing the coverage...

Today at Ethika Politika, Elyse Buffenbarger weighs in on violence and voyeurism in The Hunger Games: Flipping between reality television and footage of the war in Iraq, Susan Collins was inspired to pen The Hunger Games. The dystopian young adult trilogy has been a runaway success both of page and screen: book sales number in the tens of millions, and in 2012, the first film took in nearly $700 million worldwide. (The next film, Catching Fire, releases tomorrow.) Initially, I...