As the US federal government sidled up to the debt ceiling earlier this week without quite running into it, one of the key arguments in favor of raising the debt ceiling was that it is immoral to breach a contract. The federal government has creditors, both from whom it has borrowed money and to whom it has promised transfer payments, and it has an obligation to fulfill those promises. As Joe Carter argued here, “Member of Congress who are refusing...

There is much nostalgia about America’s agricultural past that many seem incapable of releasing. But the reality is forcing a new narrative about the family farm. In an era of globalization and government subsidizing large agribusinesses, family farmers have no choice in the near future but to diversify the use of their land and do something that is actually profitable. In the light of these realities, family farming is slowly ing more of a hobby than a means of making...

No, that’s not the name of a new James Bond movie. Rather, it’s a Public Discourse post by Anthony Esolen that discusses society’s ability (and disability) to get a handle on evil actions and morality. The cry, “You can’t legislate morality” is, of course, false. That is exactly what law does, as Esolen points out. All laws bear some relation, however distant, to a moral evaluation of good and bad. We cannot escape making moral distinctions. One man’s theft is...

A new provision under Obamacare will fine tax-exempt hospitals via the Internal Revenue Service: A new provision in Section 501 of the Internal Revenue Code, which takes effect under Obamacare, sets new standards of review and installs new financial penalties for tax-exempt charitable hospitals, which devote a minimum amount of their expenses to treat uninsured poor people. Approximately 60 percent of American hospitals are currently nonprofit. Fines could be as high as $50,000 for pliance. Some wonder if this provision...

The government shutdown and debate over the debt limit has ended — at least for now — with a rather anticlimactic denouement. A majority of Congressional representatives recognized that approving legislation was the only way to avert an economic and political crisis. So last night, they took a vote. What is extraordinary, from a global and historical perspective, is that not only Congress but also the other branches of government, as well as a plurality of citizens, recognized that was...

Earlier this month, Christian’s Library Press co-sponsored a discussion between Ken Myers, Matthew Lee Anderson, and British moral philosopher Oliver O’Donovan. Held a few blocks from the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., the conversation addressed questions and themes of political theology and was loosely centered around O’Donovan’s 1996 book The Desire of the Nations. Click here to listen to an audio of the conversation on the website of Mars Hill Audio Journal. ...

There have been whispers of it before, but now it has been confirmed: trafficking humans in order to harvest organs. The Telegraph is reporting that an underage Somali girl was smuggled into Britain with the intent of harvesting her organs for those desperately waiting for transplants. Child protection charities warned last night that criminal gangs were attempting to exploit the demand for organ transplants in Britain. Bharti Patel, the chief executive of Ecpat UK, the child protection charity, said: “Traffickers...

In a recent interview in the Wall Street Journal, billionaire Stan Druckenmiller discusses his recent university tour sounding the alarm on intergenerational theft. The article paraphrases his case: [W]hile today’s 65-year-olds will receive on average net lifetime benefits of $327,400, children born now will suffer net lifetime losses of $420,600 as they struggle to pay the bills of aging Americans. It goes on: When the former money manager visited Stanford University, the audience included older folks as well as students....

Every artist, whatever the medium, is a pale example of our Creator God, and the best artists know that. James Lee Burke, whose novels are full of violence and glimpses of evil, seems to be an unlikely candidate for drawing attention to “God’s thumbprint” in our world, but he consciously does just that. In an interview with PBS’s Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, Burke talks about how religion (specifically his Catholic faith) plays a role in his writing. His primary character...

There’s a fascinating profile of Jim DeMint, the new president of the Heritage Foundation, in BusinessWeek, which makes a good pairing for this NYT piece that focuses on the GOP’s “civil war” between establishment Republicans and Tea Partiers. But one of ments that really stuck out to me concerning DeMint’s move from the Senate to a think tank was his realization about what it would take to change the political culture in Washington. As Joshua Green writes, DeMint had previously...