A former editor at First Things, Damon Linker, has written a piece for The New Republic, which attacks, among others, his former boss, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. Linker claims that Neuhaus is a “theocon,” who wants to merge religious authority and political power. Rick Garnett at Mirror of Justice has all the details, including links to blog discussions and his previous post, criticizing Linker’s argument. I’ve read First Things for years and, in my judgment, the truth lies with Linker’s...

Large numbers of migrant populations going out of a particular area or nation should be viewed in large part as a signal of something. There are reasons for people to pick up and move, and policy and governing bodies would do well to examine these reasons. When business close facilities and open elsewhere, it is usually because the destination location has a better economic and business-friendly environment. So the natural course of action when examining this phenomena is to ask...

As student demonstrations in France mount, the government finds it increasingly difficult to dismantle restrictive labor laws that are directly tied to high unemployment rates. Michael Miller examines the political and cultural factors that are behind the French fear of economic risk taking. Read mentary here. ...

Where will they go? Churches and religious relief organizations are playing a much more active role in U.S. foreign policy. And that has been obvious in recent months in the recovery efforts for the South Asian tsunami and the Pakistan earthquakes. In March, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life invited Andrew Natsios, who recently left the U.S. Agency for International Development as chief administrator, to talk about his five-year term there. This is a must-read for anyone who...

“Letter on Immigration Deepens Split Among Evangelicals,” trumpets a story from the Washington Post. Ever since evangelicals received such credit in the election and reelection of George W. Bush, the ins and outs of evangelical politics has recieved a greater share of media attention. A great part of this attention has focused on so-called “splits” among evangelicals, as a way to highlight the newly recognized reality that all evangelicals aren’t card-carrying Republicans. So from issues like immigration to global warming,...

Jordan’s post below observes the divisions among evangelicals on the hot-button issue of immigration. Its divisiveness—cutting across the usual lines of conservative/liberal and Democrat/Republican—has made the immigration debate an unusual and therefore extraordinarily interesting one. The issue also divides Catholics. Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony has been among the most promising national voices in favor of immigrant rights. But ments have not gone unchallenged among Catholics. Activist Jim Gilchrist denounced Mahony’s views. Kathryn-Jean Lopez at NRO questioned them more delicately....

French President Jacques Chirac has given in to the student protests in his country, protests that called for the removal of the First Employment Contract. This is a controversial new law giving employers greater freedom in whom they fire amongst under-26 employees. The law, as I am sure you’ve seen, sparked students protests for weeks. Michael Miller in last Wednesday’s Acton News and Commentary addressed the deeper issue here: economic ignorance and moral apathy–I won’t repeat his analysis here. But...

Bryan Caplan at EconLog says that he has long wondered about the validity of the statistics of the spread of AIDS on the African continent: The whole story had a quasi-Soviet flavor to it. The main difference: Soviet growth statistics were too good to be true, while African AIDS statistics were too bad to be true. Reflecting on the incentives cemented my skepticism: Just as the Soviet Union had a strong incentive to exaggerate its growth numbers in order to...

It seems that it may be possible. An interesting article from yesterday’s International Herald Tribune: Danielle Scache tries to avoid using the term “capitalism” in her economics class because it has negative connotations in France. Instead, she teaches her high school students about the market economy, a slightly less controversial term she started using last year after a two-month internship at the dairy giant Danone. That was an experience that did away with more than one of her own prejudices,...

menting briefly on Psalm 19, C. S. Lewis observes the description of God’s Law as “sweeter than honey” and “more precious than gold,” the kind of descriptions that occur again and again throughout the Psalter. Lewis writes, In so far as this idea of the Law’s beauty, sweetness, or pireciousness, arose from the contrast of the surrounding Paganisms, we may soon find occasion to recover it. Christians increasingly live on a spiritual island; new and rival ways of life surround...

In this mentary, Jennifer Roback Morse takes a look at the socio-economic factors that influence the age at which young people aim to get married. Many are waiting. One reason why so many young people put off marriage unitl their late 20s or early 30s, says Morse, is that the cost of setting up an independant household is too high — unjustifiably high. Physically, humans are ready to reproduce in the mid-teens; financially, young people are not ready to be...

Silla Brush penned an interesting little piece in the latest U.S. News and World Report, using the Massachusetts health care bill as a springboard to a wider observation of policy innovation at the level of state government. Leaving aside what any of us may think about any of the initiatives mentioned (they mostly represent bigger government), the observation is a good one. But then this: When the feds stall, leave it to the states. The result may be a hodgepodge....