Yesterday, Jordan Ballor explored the relationship betweenmoney and happiness, referring to money as “a good, but not a terminal good,” and pointing to Jesus’ reminder that “life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” Over at Café Hayek, economist Russ Roberts offers a panion to this, advising college graduates to have a healthy perspective about money and meaning when entering the job market: Don’t take the job that pays the most money. Nothing wrong with money, but it’s the...

“I escaped physically, I haven’t escaped psychologically,” says Shin Dong-hyuk. His remarkable journey out of a deadly North Korean prison to freedom is chronicled in Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden. Shin didn’t escape for freedom. He had little knowledge of such a concept. He had heard that outside the prison, and especially outside North Korea, meat was available to eat. Shin was born at Camp 14 in 1982 and was strictly forbidden to leave because of the sins...

Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) took to the Senate floor yesterday and quoted Lord Acton’s well known dictum, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” There’s a partisan bite to his words, but he mostly warns against the grave dangers and tyranny under concentrated and centralized power. Cornyn of course, is addressing the multitude of scandals blowing up in Washington, many of them linked to the White House. He also admits corruption has been a problem under both political...

There are currently two sets of laws in America: laws that apply to everyone and laws that apply to everyone except for friends of the Obama administration. In January I wrote about how the executive branch had argued that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 should be broadly interpreted in order to impose criminal liability for actions that indirectly result in a protected bird’s death. The administration used that reasoning to file criminal charges against three panies. The U.S....

Values & Capitalism, a project of the American Enterprise Institute, has published a primer of sorts entitled, Economic Growth: Unleashing the Potential of Human Flourishing. The text is just over 100 pages, and gives the reader a thoughtful, concise and essential source on free market economics and its correlation to human flourishing and economic growth. Authors Edd S. Noell, Stephen L. S. Smith and Bruce G. Webb say this about their work: [T]he core proposition of this book is that...

Over at Think Christian today, I lend some broader perspective concerning the link between money and happiness occasioned by a piece on The Atlantic on some research that challenged some of the accepted scholarly wisdom on the subject. The Bible is our best resource for getting the connection between material and spiritual goods right. I conclude in the TC piece, “As Jesus put it, ‘life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.'” Or to put it another way, we...

After the recent admission by the IRS that employees targeted conservative groups, two prominent Christians e forward claiming they too were harassed for their political views. Franklin Graham, son of the famed evangelist, and Dr. Anne Hendershott, a Catholic professor and author, say they were audited by the IRS after making political statements that criticized liberal political groups. Franklin Graham recently sent a letter to President Obama saying that he believes his organization was also unfairly targeted for extra scrutiny...

In Abraham Kuyper’s recently translated sermon, “Rooted & Grounded,” he explains that the church is both “organism” and “institution,” drawing from both nature and the work of human hands. Pointing to Ephesians 3:17, he writes that, “the church of the Lord is one loaf, dough that rise according to its nature but nevertheless kneaded with human hands, and baked like bread.” Yet, as he goes on to note, this two-fold requirement is not limited to the church, but also applies...

Private schools are for the privileged and those willing to pay high costs for education; everyone else attends public school or seeks alternate options: this is the accepted wisdom. In the United States, the vast majority of students at the primary and secondary level attend public school, funded by the government. When considering education in the developing world, we may hold fast to this thinking, believing that for those in severely impoverished areas, private education is an unrealistic and scarce...

We are about a month away from Acton University, and another keynote speaker is William B. Allen. He is an expert in the American founding and U.S. Constitution; the American founders; the influence of various political philosophers on the American founding. He is Emeritus Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Political Science and Emeritus Dean, James Madison College, at Michigan State University. Currently he serves as Visiting Senior Professor in the Matthew J. Ryan Center for the Study...