After a disaster strikes, very few organizations have the vast resources and expertise to feed so many people as Southern Baptist Disaster Relief. They have received praise from countless victims and organizations, including The American Red Cross. After Katrina, they were the first to have hot food tents up and running, feeding tens of thousands three meals a day in many communities along the Gulf Coast.

Most state Baptist Conventions have their own disaster relief agencies that in many instances have the capacity to function independently without national denominational assistance. Here are a few facts that give a sense of their commitment and network for disaster relief:

Southern Baptists have 82,000 trained volunteers—including chaplains—and 1,550 mobile units for feeding, chainsaw, mud-out, command, communication, childcare, shower, laundry, water purification, repair/rebuild and power generation. SBDR is one of the three largest mobilizers of trained disaster relief volunteers in the United States, along with the American Red Cross and The Salvation Army.

Below is a short report from ABC World News Tonight on the work Southern Baptist Disaster Relief is coordinating in Moore, Oklahoma. The community of Moore sustained severe damage as well as loss of life when an EF5 tornado with wind speeds over 200 mph touched down on May 20.

Ricky Staub and Anders Lindwall were on a steady path to success in the film industry. Ricky was working for a big producer and Anders was freelancing as a commercial director. Then, God called both of them to leave their jobs and start a company of their own — one focused on leveraging the process of filmmaking toward whole-life transformation for adults in recovery.

Creating a unique business model founded on a concept called “family ratios,” NFCo melds for-profit with non-profit to train, mentor, and employ adults in recovery, a group they felt was particularly marginalized and left with few opportunities. Founding a separate non-profit called Working Film Establishment to serve as “a training ground to prepare adults in recovery for thriving employment,” Ricky and Anders now use NFCo as a for-profit wing for employing newly trained workers to “create content as a means of restoration, dignity, and hope.” As the above video notes, “in 2014, NFCo plans to enter into production on their first feature film with an entire crew recovering from homelessness, addiction, or incarceration.”

The founders of NFCo have followed the call of God on their lives, and through their daily work are actively impacting culture, the arts, and the economy through community-building, one-on-one discipleship, and creative output. Though it can be tempting for us to take the work we have for granted, NFCo offers a clear example of how God uses entrepreneurship and business to lift people up, transform relationships, and contribute to the common good.

Ricky and Anders were kind enough to share more about their story with On Call in Culture and discuss the ways God continues to use NFCo to impact the lives of others. (more…)

Economics, Politics, and the Kingdom of God
Anne Bradley, Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics

The journey we are on in life matters for the future we are building. It matters for the work God has called us to accomplish.

Cronyism: Companies like Amazon, Craigslist Use Government to Crush Competition
Rich Tucker, The Foundry

Cronyism comes in many forms, but it depends on companies using the power of the government to help them make money by blocking out competition.

State Department Splits with USCIRF on New Religious Freedom Violators
Melissa Steffan, Christianity Today

State Department’s 2012 International Religious Freedom Report highlights continued rise of anti-conversion laws as noteworthy, ‘worrying trend.’

Respecting, Not Worshipping, Free Markets
John Murdock, Values & Capitalism

One temptation for many religious types on the Right—accustomed to running in circles that confusingly mix and mingle strictly-business interests with the politics of piety—is to assume that capitalism can operate independent of higher values.

My persuasion can build a nation
Endless power
With our love we can devour
You’ll do anything for me

-Beyonce, “Run the World (Girls)”

That’s the apparent fantasy of Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky of Illinois. She recently hosted her annual fundraising luncheon, with guest speaker, Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards. Schakowsky said, “humanity is at a crossroads on this small planet and that our survival as a species is dependent on women taking charge, taking the world in our own hands.”

Given the fact that we are killing baby girls at an alarming rate all over the world, I don’t think Schakowsky is going to get her wish. Elizabeth Scalia, in a piece at First Things, has a different view. She believes men are increasingly abdicating their traditional roles in our society:

If forensic psychologist and men’s rights activist Helen Smith is correct, Schakowsky and her friends may have their hands full of the world, and sooner than they think. In her upcoming book Men on Strike, Smith offers up statistics and her own research to suggest that men are consciously boycotting marriage, fatherhood, and the “American Dream” because they feel beaten down by politically correct preferences and practices—in school, in the workplace, and in society in general. If the women want the world and all the power, the thinking goes, they can have it; the men will simply retire to whatever man-caves they are permitted.

Women, hyper-focused on “having it all”, are the ones who are now commitment-phobic, Scalia states. Driven by a desire for power that they perceive only men to have, women have managed to leave men “behind and lonely”, fearful of being “devoured” by women who won’t tolerate anyone standing in their way. Gender politics, as Scalia points out, is very complex: we can’t figure out if women should run it all or be removed from the scene before they are even born.

Read “If Women Ran the World” at First Things.

There is no doubt that higher education is costly. Textbooks alone can run $1000 a semester for some undergraduates. Waiting tables and flipping burgers won’t cover those costs. With many parents just as strapped for cash as their children, how does one pay for a college diploma?

For some young women, the answer is to sell themselves. There are websites that offer “matching” services for “mutually beneficial relationships”; that is, a young woman signs up for a “sugar daddy”. He pays for college and she has her money problems solved. One website does offer helpful information, such as “keep your emotions in check” and “sugaring is not welfare”. All just business, plain and simple. Although young men sign up for this type of arrangement, the vast majority are young women. (more…)

Bruce Edward Walker recently wrote a commentary for The Tampa Tribune entitled, Shutting Down Corporate Speech in the Name of Social Justice. He says that:

Corporate boardrooms are being caught up in a new wave of religious fervor sparked by clergy and members of religious orders in search of social justice. Alas, this movement is only superficially about the spirit. In truth, corporate directors and company executives are facing a very worldly missionary effort by priests, pastors, nuns and laypersons armed with proxy shareholder resolutions that advance politically liberal dogmas, including attempts to undermine the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling.

Enlisting members of the religious community to this movement is simply disguising “leftist ideology in church vestments.”

The nuns and friars submitting the proxy resolutions are members of the New York City-based Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, which, for the past 41 years, has established itself as “the pioneer coalition of active shareowners who view the management of their investments as a catalyst to promote justice and sustainability in the world.” The ICCR’s view of “justice and sustainability,” however, seems less grounded in Christian doctrine than talking points from MSNBC.

These resolutions, not surprisingly, list the amount of money spent by each company on “direct federal lobbying” using figures taken from Senate reports. What seems to upset the religious activists, or actually ICCR, is the lack of disclosure of “lobbying expenditures to influence legislation in states,” including “trade association payments” and “membership in tax-exempt organizations that write and endorse model legislation, such as the American Legislative Exchange Council.” (more…)

One of the powerful scenes after Hurricane Katrina was church organizations cutting their way through the roads with chainsaws so they could set up hot meal tents the very next day. Church responders have transformed into “well oiled machines” and are being praised by The Red Cross and federal agencies.

Because of Katrina, and tornadoes like the ones that decimated parts of Tuscaloosa, Ala. and Joplin, Mo., churches in those communities can offer a level of expertise to the local houses of worship in Oklahoma. Christian organizations, who have already mobilized for Oklahoma, are vital not just in the initial response, but will remain a force in the community long after the news cameras and headlines vanish.

One of the most significant problems after Katrina was that some victims, because of the shock of having everything decimated that they physically own, often became paralyzed by inaction and fall into long-term dependency. Many church agencies are now highly trained to handle these situations and can come alongside victims to help them take the first initial steps important for putting their life back together.

It is becoming much harder to make the once valid criticism that evangelical churches in America do not focus enough of their efforts and attention to serving the poor and meeting physical needs. Natural disasters, many of which have hit some of the most religious regions of America, have mobilized armies of evangelical volunteers and workers who are transformed by the words of Christ who commanded us to simply “love each other.” (John 15:17)

A new study estimates the cost of regulation in the U.S. at $14,768 per household:

For two decades, Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute has tracked the growth of new federal regulations. In his 20th anniversary edition this week, he’ll report that pages in the Code of Federal Regulations hit an all-time high of 174,545 in 2012, an increase of more than 21% during the last decade.

Relying largely on government data, Mr. Crews estimates that in 2012 the cost of federal rules exceeded $1.8 trillion, roughly equal to the GDP of Canada. These costs are embedded in nearly everything Americans buy. Mr. Crews calculates these costs at $14,768 per household, meaning that red tape is now the second largest item in the typical family budget after housing.

There are numerous government regulations that are beneficial to human flourishing and are worth the cost we pay. But many—perhaps nowadays even the majority—of federal regulations are a drain on our economy and an unjustifiable restriction of freedom.

While it would difficult to determine the value of worthy regulations, let’s say that we could reduce it in half. Households wouldn’t get the money directly, of course, but since the cost of regulations is embedded in almost everything we purchase, living expenses would be reduced dramatically. Imagine the effect of an economic surplus equal to $7,000 per household. Although $900 billion may not seem like much in an economy of $15.7 trillion, it’s more than we spend each year on Medicare/Medicaid ($802 billion), Social Security ($768 billion), or Defense ($670 billion).

Because we live in such a heavily regulated country we tend to forgot that regulations come with a price. Some regulations are worth the cost, while others are not. Determining the good from the bad is therefore not just a duty of good governance but a moral obligation. We aren’t merely wasting money on bad regulations, we are wasting resources that could be used to improve the lives of all citizens. And that’s too high a price to pay for waste.

Are school vouchers losing steam?
Abby Rapoport, Washington Post

Vouchers have been at the center of the school choice movement for many reformers, but they may be in trouble.

Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, but Not Your Homeschoolers
Joseph Knippenberg, First Things

The Romeike family, about whose case I previously posted, has lost its latest round in the federal courts. In a unanimous ruling, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Obama Administration’s contention that the Romeikes are not victims of persecution.

State Dept. Report Says Countries Have Repressed Religious Freedom With Laws
Steven Lee Myers, New York Times

Countries around the world, including allies of the United States, have used laws on blasphemy and apostasy to suppress political opponents, the State Department said on Monday in an annual report chronicling a grim decline in religious freedom that has resulted in rising bigotry and sectarian violence.

What Is Flourishing?
Hugh Whelchel, Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics

This idea of flourishing should be important to Christians today. But what is flourishing? Is it biblical? And how do we get it?

President Obama, on Sunday, delivered a touching autobiographic commencement address at Morehouse College, an all-male historically black college that is also the alma mater of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, that will likely bother many progressives.

NPR captured these important sections:

We know that too many young men in our community continue to make bad choices. Growing up, I made a few myself. And I have to confess, sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. But one of the things you’ve learned over the last four years is that there’s no longer any room for excuses. I understand that there’s a common fraternity creed here at Morehouse: ‘excuses are tools of the incompetent, used to build bridges to nowhere and monuments of nothingness.’ We’ve got no time for excuses – not because the bitter legacies of slavery and segregation have vanished entirely; they haven’t. Not because racism and discrimination no longer exist; that’s still out there. It’s just that in today’s hyperconnected, hypercompetitive world, with a billion young people from China and India and Brazil entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything you haven’t earned. And whatever hardships you may experience because of your race, they pale in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured – and overcame.

You now hail from a lineage and legacy of immeasurably strong men – men who bore tremendous burdens and still laid the stones for the path on which we now walk. You wear the mantle of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, Ralph Bunche and Langston Hughes, George Washington Carver and Ralph Abernathy, Thurgood Marshall and yes, Dr. King. These men were many things to many people. They knew full well the role that racism played in their lives. But when it came to their own accomplishments and sense of purpose, they had no time for excuses.

President Obama couldn’t be more correct. We really don’t have time for excuses for Black America. In fact, excuse making has been so much a part of the progressive agenda for the past 50 years or so that it supported the assumption that elites in government are more enlightened than the average black person and should be telling blacks where to live; how much money they should earn; why marriage, family, and fatherhood are not essential to the rearing of children; and so on.
(more…)