Today’s Acton Commentary: Teachers Unions and Civil Rights Groups Block School Choice for Black Students by Anthony B. Bradley Teachers unions, like the National Education Association (NEA), and many civil-rights organizations inadvertently sabotage the potential of black males by perpetuating failed educational visions. Black males will never achieve academic success until black parents are financially empowered to opt out of failed public school systems. The American public education system is failing many groups, but none more miserably than black males....

I’ve been meaning to write something on the “locavore” phenomenon, but nothing has quite coalesced yet. But in the meantime, in last Fridays’s NYT, Stephen Budiansky does a good job exploding the do-gooderism of the locavore legalists. Here’s a key paragraph: The best way to make the most of these truly precious resources of land, favorable climates and human labor is to grow lettuce, oranges, wheat, peppers, bananas, whatever, in the places where they grow best and with the most...

The escalating legal battle over the recent health care legislation has spilled out of the federal judiciary into state governments. An August 14 story from the New York Times reports: Faced with the need to review insurance rates and enforce a panoply of new rights granted to consumers, states are scrambling to make sure they have the necessary legal authority to carry out the responsibilities being placed on them byPresident Obama’s health care law. missioners in about half the states...

I blogged about the Jim Wallis funding controversy here and here. Now Jay Richards, a former Acton fellow, has more at NRO, beginning with a look at Wallis’s “clarification” of his earlier denials: Note that Wallis does not apologize for falsely accusing Marvin Olasky of “lying for a living.” Instead, he blames his own misrepresentation of the truth on the “spirit of the accusation.” The “clarification” of his earlier statement is equally unsatisfying. First, Wallis is still trying to claim...

From Marketwatch today, “Morgan Stanley warns on sovereign defaults”: “Outright sovereign default in large advanced economies remains an extremely unlikely e,” they said. But bondholders could suffer losses from forms of “financial oppression,” such as repaying debt with devalued currency, the analysts warned. From last week’s Acton Commentary by Sam Gregg, “Deficits, Debt, and Self-Deception”: Then there is the increased possibility that governments will resort to other, less-conventional means of deficit-reduction. As Adam Smith observed long ago in The Wealth...

The second annual Grand Rapids Film Festival starts today and The Genesis Code, a film making its debut tonight, has a strong Acton connection. One of the executives driving this production is Jerry Zandstra, who also plays the Rev. Jerry Wells in the movie. You’ll see him in the opening shots of the trailer here in the pulpit, which is what is known in Hollywood as typecasting. That’s because Zandstra is an ordained pastor in the Christian Reformed Church in...

David Murray is Professor of Old Testament and Practical Theology at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, and chairman of HeadHeartHand Media, announces the release of a new video product, God’s Technology, a product about “training our children to use technology to God’s glory.” I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Murray over lunch one day, and I look forward to seeing his presentation of “a Christian response to the digital revolution.” Dr. Murray blogs here. You can see the trailer for...

One of the inspirations for my little book, Ecumenical Babel: Confusing Economic Ideology and the Church’s Social Witness, was the incisive and insightful critique of the ecumenical movement from the Princeton theological ethicist Paul Ramsey. Ramsey’s book, Who Speaks for the Church? A Critique of the 1966 Geneva Conference on Church and Society, has a wealth of both theoretical and concrete reflections on the nature of ecumenical social witness and the relationship between church and society. He concludes the book...

As a follow-up to last week’s popular discussion (thanks to Glenn Reynolds) on prison rape, Justice Fellowship has just released a statement, “Left-Right Coalition Demands Stop to Prison Rape.” The news alert begins, “A broad coalition from the political left and right has called on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to cease any further delay in eliminating prison rape. Calling the high incidence of prison rape ‘a moral outrage,’ Prison Fellowship and supporters from both liberal and conservative organizations unveiled...

The front page of a recent issue of the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano read like an Italian “Help Wanted” listing: “Lavori per Giovani Cercasi” (cf. Aug. 13 2010). Unfortunately, this eye-catching headline was not a classified ad targeting young professionals for job openings at the Holy See’s many curial and administrative offices – the prized “stable” positions that would have Roman youth queuing in lines much longer those to enter Sunday Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica! Rather, the Vatican newspaper...