The Obama Administration is counting down the days and rounding up “navigators” to get Obamacare off the ground. (Those navigators, by the way, will get $58 for each person they sign up, on top of their hourly pay.) The big question: Is Obamacare going to work? Will it deliver better health to Americans? There are a lot of skeptics, including Forbes’ Paul Howard. Howard’s concern is that Obamacare is using mid-20th century assumptions about health and insurance in a 21st...

Last week, as the country was remember MLK’s dream of children being judged on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, Attorney General Eric Holder was suing the state of Louisiana because he’s more worried, as the Wall Street Journal says, about plexion of the schools’ student body than their manifest failure to educate. Late last week, Justice asked a federal court to stop 34 school districts in the Pelican State from handing out private-school...

Since they can have religious purposes, churches, charities, and parochial school all have legitimate — and legally recognized — claims to religious liberty. Why then, asks legal scholar Jonathan H. Adler, could for-profit corporations not also have religious purposes? An individual sole proprietor — of, say, a kosher deli, to use Will’s example — would clearly be able to press a religious liberty claim, whether or not she hopes the deli will make her rich (and whether or not mits...

Peter Greer has spent his life doing good, from serving refugees in the Congo to leading HOPE International, a Christian-based network of microfinance institutions operating in 16 countries around the world. Yet as Greer argues in his latest book, The Spiritual Danger of Doing Good, “service and charity have a dark side.” Pointing to a study by Fuller Seminary’s Dr. J. Robert Clinton, Greer notes that “only one out of three biblical leaders maintained a dynamic faith that enabled them...

The other night, I sat down with my kids to read one of my favorite Rudyard Kipling poems, “The Camel’s Hump,”a remarkable 19th-century takedown of 21st-century couch-potato culture. With typical color and wit, Kipling takes aim at idleness, decrying “the hump we get from having too little to do” — “the hump that is black and blue.”Kipling proceeds to elevate labor, noting that hard work refreshes the soul and reinvigorates the spirit: “The cure for this ill is not to...

California lawmakers are moving close to a final vote on a bill that could threaten the tax-exempt status of a variety of groups — ranging from the Boy Scouts to Little League — if their membership policies are found to differentiate on “gender identity,” “sexual orientation,” and other bases. As Alliance Defending Freedom explains, the proposed legislation also threatens religious liberties: SB 323, which bans discrimination based on “religion” and “religious affiliation,” and which contains no exemption from these bans...

Reading the 2013 results of proxy shareholder resolutions orchestrated by various leftist organizations affiliated with “religiously” oriented investment groups, a colorfully descriptive phrase came to mind to describe both: Whatever its derivation, useful idiots is employed as “a pejorative term for people perceived as propagandists for a cause whose goals they are not fully aware of, and who are used cynically by the leaders of the cause.” For the purposes of this post, we’ll grant groups with purported religious and...

With a bit of breathless excitement (“a progressive theological current“), there is news in Rome that Pope Francis is ing liberation theology back into the Vatican. On Sunday, Sept. 8, the Vatican announced a meeting between the pope and Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Mueller has co-authored a book with Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian who is considered the founder of liberation theology, and the two will present the book to Pope...

On Sept. 28, Rev. Robert Sirico will participate in a “National Briefing on Religious Liberty.” The Colson Center has partnered with the Truth of a New Generation Conference to bring together this panel discussion. Rev. Sirico is joined by: Lauren Green – moderator (Fox News) Dr. Timothy George (Beeson Divinity school), Jennifer Marshall (The Heritage Foundation), Eric Teetsel (Manhattan Declaration), John Stonestreet (Colson Center), and Eric Metaxas The panel discussion will be followed by a keynote address from Metaxas. Please...

As Congress decides whether mit the U.S. to another war in the Middle East, Democratic Representative Charles Rangel of New York is proposing — yet again — that Congress reinstate the military draft. Rep. Rangel, a decorated veteran of the Korean War and the third-longest-serving member of Congress, has proposed reinstating the draft about a half dozen times over the past decade. After he proposed the legislation in 2004, Congressional Republicans called his bluff and Rangel voted against his own...