While enjoying time off this weekend, why not take some time to learn more about America’s military sacrifice in defense of liberty? Many of the best books I’ve ever read have been about American military history. When I worked for former Congressman Gene Taylor in Gulfport, Miss. one of my favorite parts of my job while working constituent services for veterans was listening to stories about battles from places like Okinawa, Khe Sanh, and Hue City. I’ve read all of the books compiled below and all of them tell magnificent stories of virtue, honor, sacrifice, and leadership. Obviously this is not a comprehensive list but I worked at including different conflicts and service branches. While I could expand it, I’m asking readers to add your own recommendations in the comment section.

1) The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: This is easily one of the greatest books on Naval Warfare ever written. The author, James D. Hornfischer, weaves together a dramatic David and Goliath battle in the Pacific, where a force of U.S. destroyers and cruisers took on a Japanese fleet over ten times its size. It was perhaps the U.S. Navy’s finest hour during WWII, but it came with a monumental price. The sacrifice of these sailors deserve to be honored and forever remembered.

2) Joker One: A Marine Platoon’s Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood: A Great account by Donovan Campbell about his Marine platoon in Ramadi, Iraq in 2004. This is an excellent book that offers Christian themes rooted in love, servant leadership, and sacrifice. I reviewed Joker One for the PowerBlog in 2009.

3) Bury Us Upside Down: The Misty Pilots and the Secret Battle for the Ho Chi Minh Trail: A thorough and riveting look at the air war over Vietnam along the Ho Chi Minh Trail that uncovers lots of new information about the conflict in Southeast Asia. I particularly appreciate the exhaustive research the authors did about the families of these heroic pilots who sacrificed their lives in Vietnam.

4) One Square Mile of Hell: I don’t understand how this narrative about the Battle of Tarawa by John Wukovits has never been made into a movie. The account is vivid and suspenseful with its description of the short lives for many Marines who landed on the Tarawa Atoll in 1943. This book too does a tremendous job of telling the stories of a few of the families who sacrificed their lives. It was also the first WWII battle that showed the bodies of dead Americans in newsreels to the public back home. Special permission had to be granted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to show the dramatic loss of life on film from this battle.

5) We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: A great chronicle of the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley in 1965 and the courageous men who served in the 1st Battalion of the 7th Cavalry. Written by retired Lt. General Harold Moore and war correspondent Joe Galloway, this book tells the stories of numerous heroic men like John Goeghegan and Willie Godbolt who paid the ultimate price in Vietnam. A popular movie based on the book was released in 2002.

6) With the Old Breed: Eugene B. Sledge was a superb writer and this is some of the best war literature you will ever find. Few accounts capture the human emotion of combat like With the Old Breed. I reviewed the book for Veterans Day in 2010.

7) House to House: This is simply a riveting account on the intense urban combat that wracked Fallujah, Iraq in November 2004. The battle is often referred to the Second Battle of Fallujah. I debated including this work over some other books because of some excessive cussing, but in the end I couldn’t keep it off the list. It’s an emotional and intense read and captures well the courage and sacrifice of so many who fought and died in Iraq during the bloodiest years of the war. SSG Bellavia paid tremendous tribute to the men that fought by his side.

About a decade ago I joined a couple of other semi-clueless entrepreneurs in starting a regional newspaper in East Texas. Although I had always been a praying man, I found a lot more to pray about while starting a business: praying we’d make payroll, praying we’d find advertisers, praying the newspaper industry wouldn’t collapse before our next edition, etc.

Apparently, I wasn’t alone. According to information recently published by the Association of Religion Data Services, U.S. entrepreneurs pray more, meditate more and are more likely to believe in “a God” and attend a religious congregation than non-entrepreneurs:

The ARDA release published last month, draws on data from the 2010 Baylor Religion Survey which shows that people who have started or were starting a new business were more likely to believe in a God who personally cared for them. They also meditated and prayed more frequently than non-entrepreneurs.

“For entrepreneurs, business ventures may provide a ready list of concerns voiced to a God they believe is listening,” Baylor researchers Kevin Dougherty, Mitchell Neubert, and Jenna Griebel and Jerry Park noted.

When times get tough, according to Dougherty, many entrepreneurs may find themselves strengthened by the belief “God is with them and interested in them and attends to their needs.”

Read more . . .

Don Boudreaux  and Mark J. Perry at Cafe Hayek are here to tell you: life in the 1950s for America’s middle class is not the wonderland we might like to think.

A favorite “progressive” trope is that America’s middle class has stagnated economically since the 1970s. One version of this claim, made by Robert Reich, President Clinton’s labor secretary, is typical: “After three decades of flat wages during which almost all the gains of growth have gone to the very top,” he wrote in 2010, “the middle class no longer has the buying power to keep the economy going.”

This trope is spectacularly wrong.

They point out that 60 years ago, the average middle-class home spent over 50% of its disposable income on food, utilities, rent/mortgage, etc. Today, that figure is closer to 30%. To prove the point that we don’t have a stagnant middle class stuck in some sort of economic time warp, Boudreaux has started a fun series, using commercials from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s to remind us where we were and where our memories may be leading us astray. Like many of us, Boudreaux learned to type on an electric typewriter. It was state-of-art, the best of the best. Do you want to swap your iPad for it?

You can check out the second of this series here.

At The Gospel Coalition’s 2013 National Conference, Tim Keller kicked off a Faith at Work post-conference by exploring what it means to be a Christian in the marketplace.

Keller argues that we have to view our work through the larger Biblical story of Creation > Fall > Redemption > Restoration. If God is the creator of all things, and if through Christ all things are made new, that process of restoration must include our work.

Keller proceeds to offer five ways that the  theology of the Bible shapes the way we work. (more…)

Morality and Economic Freedom: A Response to Gregg
Robert T. Miller, Public Discourse

Aristotelian-Thomistic moral philosophy doesn’t imply that every economy should be capitalist.

Natural Law and the Economy: A Reply to Miller
Samuel Gregg, Public Discourse

Natural law does not demand capitalism, but we can deduce from natural law that some institutions that are key to market economies are normally just, while practices key to socialist arrangements are usually unjust.

The Biblical Roots of Private Property
Jay W. Richards, Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics

Property is rooted in the grand story of the Bible. It was given by God at creation, as a means by which we exercise our call to stewardship and dominion as we fill the earth and develop it.

The Book We Still Can’t Spare
Lars Walker, The American Spectator

Without the Bible, can there be democracy?

AllAfrica.com published a press release from the Guttmacher Institute, the research division of Planned Parenthood, summarizing a new study that “the poorest countries are lagging far behind higher-income developing countries in meeting the demand for modern contraception. Between 2003 and 2012, the total number of women wanting to avoid pregnancy and in need of contraception increased from 716 million to 867 million, with growth concentrated among women in the 69 poorest countries where modern method use was already very low.”

Around the developing world, “Roughly three-quarters (73%) of the 222 million women in developing countries who want to avoid a pregnancy but are not using a modern method now live in the poorest countries, compared with 67% in 2003,” according to the report. “Furthermore, women in the poorest countries who want to avoid pregnancy are one-third as likely to be using a modern method as those living in higher-income developing countries.” Thankfully, between 2003 and 2012, “there was a shift away from sterilization (declining from 47% to 38% of all modern method use in developing countries) toward methods with higher failure rates, namely barrier methods (increasing from 7% to 13%) and injectables (from 6% to 9%).”

For those who value human dignity, this is actually good news. The “lagging behind” of birth control availability and success is the greatest hope for the developing world. In addition to the rule of law and sustained property rights, what Africa needs is more people, not less, in order for many countries to build the types of sustainable economies that allow real needs to be met in the long-run. In Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II explains why:
(more…)

As part of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) “Fortnight For Freedom” campaign, the USCCB has enumerated a number of threats to Americans’ religious liberty. Besides the on-going battle with the Obama Administration regarding the HHS mandate and the gutting of funding to Catholic programs that fight human trafficking, the bishops want us to be aware of these perils to religious liberty:

• Catholic foster care and adoption services.  Boston, San Francisco, the District of Columbia, and the State of Illinois have driven local Catholic Charities out of the business of providing adoption or foster care services—by revoking their licenses, by ending their government contracts, or both—because those Charities refused to place children with same-sex couples or unmarried opposite-sex couples who cohabit.
• State immigration laws.  Several states have recently passed laws that forbid what they deem as “harboring” of undocumented immigrants—and what the Church deems Christian charity and pastoral care to these immigrants.
• Discrimination against small church congregations.  New York City adopted a policy that barred the Bronx Household of Faith and other churches from renting public schools on weekends for worship services, even though non-religious groups could rent the same schools for many other uses.  Litigation in this case continues.

(more…)

Adopting a child can be a laborious, time-consuming, and expensive process. So why is the IRS trying to make it even more laborious, time-consuming, and expensive? As David French notes, in 2012, the IRS requested additional information from 90 percent of returns claiming the adoption tax credit and went on to actually audit 69 percent:

So Congress implemented a tax credit to facilitate adoption – a process that is so extraordinarily expensive that it is out of reach for many middle-class families — and the IRS responded by implementing an audit campaign that delayed much-needed tax refunds to the very families that needed them the most. Oh, and the return on its investment in this harassment? Slightly more than 1 percent.

This audit wave got almost no media coverage, but what was the experience like for individual families? In a word, grueling. Huge document requests with short turnaround times were followed by lengthy IRS delays in processing, all with no understanding for the unique documentation challenges of international adoption.

Read more . . .

(Via: HotAir)

People with autism frequently have a difficult time socially: they don’t always pick up on social “cues” most of us take for granted such as vocal inflections, facial expressions, gestures and maintaining eye contact. In terms of finding suitable jobs, this can be an obstacle. However, there are entrepreneurs who actively seek out the autistic as employees.

Thorkil Sonne of Denmark is the founder of a software testing company, Specialisterne. His company

uses their special skills to out-perform the market and offer an often isolated group of people opportunities for active, productive lives. Attention to detail, precision, and unerring focus are qualities that come bundled with the disabilities of autism and make autistic people particularly adept in certain fields. Autistic individuals have markedly different vocational needs than other developmentally disabled people, and Thorkil is providing a working environment where their skills are capitalized upon and it is “normal” to have autism.

(more…)

State Dept. urged to list key rel. liberty violators
Tom Strode, Baptist Press

The U.S. State Department disappointed religious freedom advocates by again failing to designate in its latest annual report the world’s worst violators of the human right.

Prager University Debunks Myths Surrounding Separation of Church and State Meme
Christian Toto, Breitbart.com

The so-called “separation of Church and State” is invoked so often it might as well appear on the dollar bill.

Peter van Uhm: Why I chose a gun
Fr. Gregory, Koinonia

While recognising war as evil, the Church does not prohibit her children from participating in hostilities if at stake is the security of their neighbours and the restoration of trampled justice.

No More Church Evictions from Public Schools, Says New York City Council
Jeremy Weber, Christianity Today

Long-running legal standoff over churches renting Sunday worship space in schools has been on hold since last June.