The Census Bureau today released a report citing that 37 million Americans lived under the poverty line, a jump of 1.1 million from 2003. "I was surprised," said Sheldon Danziger, co-director of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan. "I thought things would have turned around by now." What’s missing are the poverty threshold numbers that reveal that a family of four is considered "poor" if family income is below $19,000. What’s actually on the rise is not the number of poor people but the minimum income required for official "poverty" status. In 1980, a family of four was poor if income was below $8,400.

Read more on It’s Wealth Not Poverty That’s On The Rise…

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the formation of Poland’s Solidarity movement. Samuel Gregg says that Solidary gives us a view of a labor union whose “stand for the truth about the human person and against the lie of Marxism contributed immeasurably to the collapse of one of the two great totalitarian evils that disfigured the twentieth-century.”

Read more on For Our Freedom and Yours: Remembering Solidarity…

Rev. Robert Sirico responds to Pat Robertson’s highly-publicized call for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. “What is needed here, I believe, is a time of reflection. Christianity is not a national religion. It is does not regard every enemy of the nation-state as worthy of execution. It prefers peace to war. It chooses diplomacy over threat. It respects the right to life of everyone, even those who have objectionable political views,” he writes.

Read more on Robertson’s Fatwa…

Courtesy of Rev. Eric Andrae, Lutheran pastor Bo Giertz offers us a great exposition of the “great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) and sums up the importance of the pastoral ministry. “‘It is a great thing to receive a heritage…. It is wonderful to stand in the same pulpit, to learn of [those who have gone before us,] and to carry forward the work they began. Sir…, can anything be greater than to be a pastor in God’s church?’” (Bo Giertz, The Hammer of God, 191).

Read more on ‘No Higher Calling’…

The Americans brought this on themselves.

That’s one reaction coming from around the world as it surveys the devastation following Hurricane Katrina. In what can only be described as callously political maneuvering, Germany’s environmental minister Jürgen Trittin said today, “The increasing frequency of these natural events can only be explained through global warming which is caused by people.”

Read more on The Voice of a Secular Prophet…

Outsiders looking from the outside into Europe will probably answer that question in the affirmative, and with good reason. The churches are emptying, the economies are tanking, and the politicians continue to fiddle along. Very few have a clue of how to fix things.

Read more on Has Europe Gone Completely Insane?…

You may have heard of “fair trade,” one of the more recent economically-myopic efforts to act as “guarantees that farmers and farmworkers receive a fair price for their labor.”

I’ve written before about the fair trade coffee movement (especially in the Church), which has perhaps gained the most public attention. But fair traders haven’t overlooked any consumables, and the broader movement is likely to receive more attention in the future, as fair trade is a plank in platform of the ONE Campaign (see the text of the ONE Declaration). I’d like to point you in particular to this FAQ about fair trade bananas.

Read more on Fair Trade Goes Bananas…

Is there a columnist anywhere in the world more in line with Pope John Paul II’s social teachings than Mark Steyn?

All the more amazing as he regularly writes for the extremely secularist British press!

Read more on Must Reading: SteynOnline…

Hurricane Katrina passed over New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf coast earlier today, and reports of “price gouging” are already coming in.

In Alabama, when the governor declares a state of emergency, it triggers a legal barrier to “unconscionable pricing.” That is (arbitrarily?) determined by the government to be a raise of 25% or more above the “normal” price.

Read more on The Ethics of ‘Price Gouging’…

“First Lightning” detonation

This day in 1949, the Soviets tested their first nuclear device, codenamed “First Lightning.” The 20 kiloton bomb was dropped in a remote region of Kazakhstan and detonated over a model town filled with empty buildings and animals, placed to measure the effects of the bomb on a city populated by mammals.

Read more on Remembering the Cold War…