For those of you following the case of Paul Jacob, here’s a link to John Powers’ column in the Chicago Daily Observer. For those of you catching up: Jacob, the Senior Advisor at the Sam Adams Foundation, has been indicted on charges related to his work leading a petition drive in Oklahoma. Jacob is charged with a felony of conspiring against the State of Oklahoma in collecting signatures in favor of a Taxpayer Bill of Rights by an out of...

Society is changing as economic freedom and diversification gradually creep into the Middle East. Dr. Samuel Gregg, director of research at the Acton Institute, explores the effects of free trade on nations including Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates and, in turn, the effect those nations are having on their neighbors. The diversification of economies, notably the development of new products and services for export, allows nations to grow out of reliance on oil production as the main...

I remember riding back to seminary in Kentucky a couple years ago with a young lady and we pulled off the expressway to grab a bite. As we were getting ready to pay our bill, the young lady, who happened to be from Mississippi, said, “God is telling me to give 100 dollars to this young man behind the counter of this restaurant. ” Needless to say this young man was thankful of God’s decision to speak through the young...

Truth is definitely stranger than fiction, with Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sharing this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. In recent years, the Nobel Committee has shown itself more and more willing to name the Peace prize for political reasons. In awarding Al Gore and the IPCC the Peace Prize, however, the Nobel Committee has lost all pretense to objectivity. Not only are Al Gore and the IPCC shamelessly partisan choices, but also irrelevant ones. Whatever one...

How’s this for an expression of un-Christian retributiveness? If God wants to make my plete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before their death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one’s enemies – but not before they have been hanged. –Heinrich Heine, Gedanken und Überlegungen; quoted and translated in Freud,...

In a stunning turn of events, the Nobel Committee failed to award a Nobel Prize for Science to Al Gore, instead opting to present him with the Peace Prize despite the scant evidence that his recent climate change-related activities have contributed anything to the advancement of global peace. The award can be seen as something of a consolation prize for Gore, however, as in recent days even the British judicial system has ruled that “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore’s global warming...

Kishore Jayabalan, director of Acton’s Rome office, was interviewed by Radio Free Europe’s Jeffrey Donovan today about the Vatican’s reaction to a letter sent this week to Pope Benedict XVI by more than 130 Muslim leaders. The letter urged peace and understanding between the faiths, warning that the “world’s survival” could be at stake. The audio of the interview is not available online. What follows is a transcript of ments to Donovan: “The Vatican is actually ment until it’s had...

“The mission in Iraq may be on the way to being plished…” So says Bartle Bull in Prospect magazine (HT). Maybe we should start thinking of the first declaration of “mission plished” (May 1, 2003, pictured above) as a sort of D-Day, and the imminent(?) “mission plished” as a sort of V-E Day (that’s also mon analogy used to describe the “already/not yet” dynamic of the times between Christ’s first and ing.) See also, “Democracy in Iraq.” ...

I used to have more regular and extensive interaction with people whose worldviews were starkly different from my own. That’s not so much the case anymore, so it’s good to be reminded occasionally that some people live in different worlds that are sometimes hard prehend. That happened today when I came across an announcment for a conference, “The Secular Society and Its Enemies.” In the strange universe in which the conference’s organizers live, “The world is finally waking up to...

Freemasonry has been deemed to be worthy of protection under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA). Does this mean that freemasonry is a “religion”? A California court of appeals statement said in part, “We see no principled way to distinguish the earnest pursuit of these (Masonic) principles … from more widely acknowledged modes of religious exercise.” That’s a stance the Christian Reformed Church would probably agree with. As I’ve noted before, the CRC’s position on...