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Greed hurts: Causes of the global financial crisis
“Greed is good,” insisted Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street. Most of us disagree. Recent events in the mortgage lending industry prove us right. Financial derivatives became a house of cards built on greed.What’s the matter with socialized medicine?
Daniel interpreted the writing on the wall for the decadent King Belshazzar. “You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting” (Daniel 5:27). Socialized medicine deserves similar judgment.The fiscal responsibility of mall rats and bureaucrats
Could it be that the average mall rat, with all of his or her excessive spending and credit card debt, is actually a better steward of resources than the Washington bureaucrat?The truth about tithing
If American Christians were to focus on the simple obedience of giving back to God what is really His in the first place, the church would have the resources to do great things. But we should give not primarily because of the good we expect it will do the church, or others, or ourselves (although these may be valid considerations for how we give). Ultimately we should give because, as the children’s song goes, the Bible tells us so.A Christmas message
This has been a season of anticipation and expectation, but for what? The answer comes in numerous ways: Deliverance, being set free, release of the captive, proclaiming a year of liberty.Between virtue and sophism: Competition in American education
The latest outrageous proposal emanating from the halls of academia -- a $5000 “baby levy” and annual carbon tax on children, courtesy of Australian Professor Barry Waters -- returns us to a controversial question. Do intellectuals contribute to or detract from societies’ well being? The question is difficult to answer, in part because academic work is often not subject to two related phenomena that help to manifest value in other spheres: competition and price.The pope’s anti-political politics
“Hope.” Like the word “love,” it's overused today, but that’s the fundamental theme of Benedict XVI’s new encyclical Spe Salvi. Just as his first encyclical Deus Caritas Est explored the subject of love, Catholicism’s theologian-pope has chosen to focus on an indispensable dimension of the Christian message.Farm subsidies: Sustaining dependency
The $291 billion farm bill currently up for debate in the U.S. Senate offers more of the same, discredited thinking on subsidies that ultimately harm, not help, American agriculture.What Latin Americans want
People often want mutually exclusive things, like private entrepreneurship and a big welfare state.The Big Picture on Microfinance
Among those concerned about economic development for the marginalized, few things have inspired the imagination and generated such excitement as microfinance. Secular and religious organizations alike tout it as force to fight poverty and empower the poor, especially women. While microfinance can play a role in helping people become independent, free them from the vicious cycle of loan sharks, create a sense of empowerment, and help people get out of abject poverty, its long term role in poverty reduction is unclear.Stemming government cell research
The stem cell news that came out last week has been making well deserved headlines. As Father Thomas Berg of the Westchester Institute put it, “a new day has dawned in the world of stem cell research.” In separate articles in the journals Science and Cell, research teams in Wisconsin and Japan both demonstrated that they have achieved the reprogramming of adult stem cells to exhibit all the developmental capabilities of embryonic stem cells.Fighting AIDS with African common sense
Amid reports that the United Nations has been grossly overestimating the scope of the global AIDS pandemic, a new book points to what may be an even greater miscalculation: AIDS relief efforts have failed to understand the crucial role of family and community networks in controlling the disease.