The resemblance is uncanny.

Who said liberation theology was dead?

A brief Q&A with Acton research fellow and Covenant Theological Seminary professor Anthony Bradley has been posted here, “How Jacked-Up Punks Will Change The World,” in preparation for Anthony’s speaking engagement at the Reform & Resurge Conference 2006, May 9th – 11th in Seattle, WA.

Read more on Reform & Resurge Conference 2006…

Pat Nolan, president of Justice Fellowship, writes about the challenges that non-profits face in seeking funding, in the latest Justice eReport, “Equpping the Armies of Compassion.” Nolan highlights the Acton Institute’s Samaritan Guide and We Care America, which has a grant center that assists charities in getting proposals together.

Read more on Equpping the Armies of Compassion…

An apple a day…

Here’s an interesting story–Apple Corps is suing Apple Computer for breach of contract. You probably recognize the first Apple as the company owned by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and the widows of the other two Beatles. Since 1991, Apple Corps has had a deal with Apple Computer: in essence, the music company agrees to stay out of the computer and telecommunications business, and the computer company agrees to stay out of the music business–technically, each has agreed to keep its trademark out of the others “field of use.” All was fine and dandy until innovation reared its head: iTunes. Through its iTunes Music Store, Apple Computer now sells over three million songs a day–a success driven largely by the invention of the iPod. Apple Corps claims that Apple Computer has now elbowed in to the former’s “field of use.”

Read more on Apples and Oranges?…

It has been a bit of a mystery over the last few months, as an anonymous group of developers had been purchasing up a series of properties near downtown Grand Rapids. The investigative work of the local TV news turned up the plans for the group to end up with a 41-acre area that runs along the Grand River through the heart of downtown.

Read more on Grand Rapids Growth…

“Immigration creates wealth,” says Larry Kudlow:

Part of the immigration problem is simply Mexico’s inadequate growth and lack of economic opportunity. The country is growing at about 3 percent a year, but it ought to be growing at six to ten percent. Our southern neighbor ought to be the “Mexican Tiger,” but continues to be the “Mexican Chihuahua.”

He also cites and explicates a column by Linda Chavez in The Washington Times, “illustrating what great entrepreneurs and small-business owners Hispanics are.”

Read more on Kudlow on Immigration…

It was a major topic of discussion during the era of corporate scandals a couple years ago, but the issue of executive compensation still pops up in the news from time to time, and it remains a problem with which serious thinkers continue to grapple.

Read more on CEO Paychecks…

Kofi Akosah in Accra, Ghana, writes in the latest Campaign for Fighting Diseases newsletter about the prospects for the use of DDT in fighting malaria in his home country. He first describes the devastation that the disease wreaks: “More than 17 million of Ghana’s 20 million people are infected by malaria every year, costing the nation a colossal 850 million cedis (US$94 million) for treatment alone.”

Read more on Mulling over Malaria…

An snippet from Ecumenical News International:

Presbyterians invest $1 million in church ‘bank’ that helps poor

New York (ENI). The Presbyterian Church (USA) has invested US$1 million in Oikocredit, an organization established by the World Council of Churches that assists people in poor countries start small businesses. The investment is the largest in Oikocredit over more than a decade, the church announced earlier this week, making the 2.4-million-member US denomination the second-largest investor in the institution set up in 1975. The largest is the Church of Sweden.

Read more on Giving Credit where Credit is Due…

Joe Knippenberg raises three issues with respect to my critique of the faith-based initiative (here and here). He writes first, “any activity that depends upon money is potentially corrupting, whether the source is governmental or private…. Why governmental money is different from private in this regard isn’t clear to me.”

I agree that the potential for corruption is present in both cases, but the immediate constituency differs from private to public funds. For the former, the donors are the immediate stake-holders and the charity is accountable to them. For the latter, politicians and bureaucrats are those who hold the charity immediately accountable.

Despite the best intentions of many people who work in government, special interests and ideologies can skew their proper stewardship of taxpayer money, and does not always represent the interests of the citizenry. Since taxpayer money is mediated through the government, there is another layer of institutionalization that serves to increase the distance and thus the accountability between the charity and the donor constituency.

This raises another important issue, which is that strictly speaking taxpayers shouldn’t be considered “donors” in the traditional sense at all. Paying taxes is enforced by the power of the state in a way that voluntary donation to private charities is not. One aspect of this is the distancing effect I just pointed out, but another effect is that the moral virtue of the act of giving is displaced by the coercive nature of the taxpayer/government relationship. Surely those who voluntarily give even more to charities than they are required by taxation are worthy of even greater praise because of this, but nevertheless the nature of the money flowing in to charities from these two sources is quite different. One is coerced the other is voluntary. Read more on Faith in the Faith-Based Initiative…