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Free-market federalism
States and municipalities craft laws that reflect local cultures, and this proximity to the people has market consequences.Europe’s real time-bomb
While Europe’s governments and financial markets have been fixated in recent months by the ongoing fiscal and political disaster otherwise known as Greece, the challenges facing one of the EU’s smallest members are, frankly, quite minor compared to what may well be Europe’s biggest looming internal problem: France. The name of that challenge? In a word: France.The real Oscar Romero
There are two prominent churchmen of our era whose lives and words expose the difference between a "preferential option for the poor" and a preferential option for the state. The first is Archbishop Oscar Romero. The second is Pope Francis. The first is Archbishop Oscar Romero. When an agent of El Salvador's military regime fired a single bullet into Oscar Romero's chest, the archbishop was in the midst of celebrating Mass. But it seems that before Romero could be laid to rest, he became an unlikely hero to Marxists and Liberation Theologians in Latin America.‘Christ and Crisis’ today
Charles Malik. Photo credit: LIFE Magazine.No faith-based case for FCC’s net neutrality power grab
What could possibly go wrong with a regulatory power grab by a government agency applying an 80-year-old law to the most dynamic and innovative aspect of the world’s economy? The Federal Communications Commission last week voted along partisan lines for passage of network neutrality regulations. The first two attempts were both defeated in U.S. Circuit Court, and one hopes this third try meets the same fate.Women and the Academy Awards: Hashtag nonsense and factual farce
This year, the Academy Awards got a little injection of faux feminism. Hollywood’s female elite, woefully tired of being asked, “Who are you wearing?” cried out for more substantial red carpet questions. A hashtag campaign was created (because that’s how we show our fury, America!), and #AskHerMore was launched.Oscar Romero: An archbishop driven by faith, not ideology
While on a lecture tour of El Salvador about a year ago, I asked my hosts if it were possible to visit the church where Oscar Romero celebrated his last Mass in 1980. The Salvadorian archbishop was assassinated by a government hit squad at the point in the Mass known as the Offertory. Here, the priest slightly raises first the host and then the chalice in a re-enactment of Christ’s institution of the Eucharist, which Catholics believe to be the self-offering of Christ for the salvation of the world.Fossil fuel divestment: Economically reckless and morally callous
Relatively inexpensive and increasingly cleaner burning fossil fuels have been a boon to humanity for the past 150 years. Furthermore, fossil fuels have reignited nearly every sector of our economy since the Great Recession, including businesses and financial markets, and created huge opportunities for the middle class and the poor.A Parable for the unemployed
The theme of work recurs and reverberates throughout the Christian Scriptures. We see it from the very beginning in Genesis 1, where human beings are created in God’s image and blessed with the call: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.” The call to work appears again in a more specific form with the creation account of Adam and Eve, in which Adam is “placed in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it,” and Eve is created to be Adam’s co-laborer (Gen. 2:15, 18).Communion and consumerism
The Anglican Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, made a number of very good points about the moral and spiritual dangers of consumerism in a recent talk. And from a certain perspective he’s right when he says that consumer society is a “mechanism for distributing unhappiness.”The monk as merchant: Economic wisdom from a desert hermit
Before Max Weber ever conducted his study of the “Protestant ethic” of hard work and commerce as a matter of one’s election before God, there was the ascetic ethic of the ancient Church. A story from the Sayings of the Desert FathersThe high price of human trafficking
On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. In the minds and hearts of many, both in the United States and elsewhere, this was the end of slavery. If only that were so.