Dr. Arthur C. Brooks spoke about “happiness” at an Acton Lecture Series event last week. Dr. Brooks, a professor of Business and Government Policy at Syracuse University and a visiting scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, presented evidence which suggests that religion is the greatest factor in general human happiness in the United States. Religion, argues Dr. Brooks, is essential to human flourishing in the United States and public secularism should be strongly guarded against by everyone – religious or...

The Archbishop of York Dr. John Sentamu has some ments passion and consumerism in this BBC article. The Church of England leader is fearful that religious charity passion is being crowded out and under utilized. “Human rights without the safeguarding of a God-reference tends to set up rights which trump others’ rights when the mood music changes,” he says. The Archbishop also criticized calls for removal of religion from the public square, saying it would usher in rampant consumerism. You...

The BBC is reporting that the Indian state of Maharashtra plans to construct a statue on an artificial island off the coast of Bombay (HT: Zondervan>To the Point). “The statue will be of the Maratha warrior king Shivaji, considered a hero in Maharashtra for his defiance of Mughal and British forces.” The officials apparently have in mind a rival for the American Statue of Liberty: “Vishal Dhage, a state government official, said the statue would be about the same height...

Here’s the key assumption in Michael Gerson’s piece from last week, “The Libertarian Jesus”: passion cannot replace Medicaid or provide AIDS drugs to millions of people in Africa for the rest of their lives. In these cases, a role for government is necessary passionate — the expression of mitments to the general welfare and the value of every human life. passion certainly could do this, and much more. Private giving generally dwarfs government programs in both real dollars and effectiveness....

It might seem like ancient political history to younger readers, but once upon a time there was a Republican Speaker of the House named Newt Gingrich and a Democratic President named Bill Clinton. A new book by Steven Gillon, The Pact, claims that the two ostensibly bitter enemies made a promising but ultimately abortive attempt to reform Social Security and Medicare. As one who has contributed modestly to that quixotic quest (here, most recently), I was fascinated by this interview...

Is this supposed to be capitalism? Geoff Colvin writes that a motivating factor in the recent crash in corporate profits, as well as the sharp decline in home values, was the phenomenon that “people began to believe that the more they borrowed, the better off they would be. Their thinking went like this: With the cost of capital so low and asset prices rising steadily, risk was evaporating.” The precipitating cause of the downturn was that consumers “began to live...

In an interview promoting his recent book Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite, D. Michael Lindsay, describes what he sees to be the intellectual sources of evangelicalism: And the interesting thing is that the Presbyterian tradition, the Reformed tradition, has provided some of the intellectual gravitas for evangelical ascendancy. And it’s being promulgated in lots of creative ways so that you have the idea of Kuyper or a mission of cultural engagement is being...

While we await Pope Benedict’s first social encyclical, it has been interesting to note what he has been saying on globalization and other socio-economic issues affecting the world today. None of these amounts to a magisterial statement but there are nonetheless clues to his social thought. So that makes his address to the Centesimus Annus pro Pontifice Foundation noteworthy. The Pope spoke about the current state of globalization, reminding the audience that the aim of economic development must serve the...

A good hump day timewaster: APM’s Budget Hero. Try to achieve the national security, efficient government, and economic stimulus badges all at the same time. I couldn’t on my first try, although I admit I was leaning much more heavily on the “efficient government” side of the ledger. Plus there were all the built-in biases to deal with… ...

Sometime Acton publications contributor and adjunct scholar Thomas Sieger Derr posts on the First Things blog under the title, “The End of the Global Warming Scare?” Derr identifies a trend that has not been ignored on this blog: increasingly vocal and widespread skepticism toward at least the most dire predictions emanating from the climate change disaster crowd. I would add to Derr’s observations that consternation over oil prices is likely to encourage reluctance to implement any costly programs that have...