Two pieces on Christianity Today’s website this week are worthy of comment. The first, “Despair Not,” reminds us that “there is something worse than misery and death.” The author Stephen L. Carter interacts with C.S. Lewis’ famous book, The Screwtape Letters, to show that “the terrible tragedies that befall the world work to Satan’s benefit only if we despair. Suffering, as Screwtape reminds his nephew, often strengthens faith. Better to keep people alive, he says, long enough for faith to be worn away. The death of a believer is the last thing the Devil wants.”

Read more on Death and Despair, Life and Hope…

From the same issue of Business 2.0 magazine I cited yesterday, check out this article on Adobe Systems, which is touted as having “The greenest office in America.” It just goes to show you that economic efficiency and environmental concerns go hand in hand.

Read more on ‘Green’ Offices are Economical…

Last week, Pope Benedict XVI addressed the Canadian Bishops who were making their ad limina visit. A worthwhile read, especially concerning the strong language His Holiness uses to condemn the symptoms of crumbling Western culture.

Read more on Social Issues, B16, and our Fundamental Task…

In a recent issue of Business 2.0 magazine, we are told that X Prize founder Peter Diamandis is expanding his X Prize Foundation to address new areas of innovation. The first Ansari X Prize included a $10 million purse for the first private spaceflight. The X Prize Foundation website notes that the group is “actively researching the feasibility of new prizes in space, energy, genomics, education, nanotechnology, and prizes in the social arena,” but Business 2.0 gives us some more particulars on three new X Prizes:

Read more on ‘X’ Marks the Spot…

Jeff Mirus of CatholicCulture.org flogs an address by Capuchin friar and dean of theology at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore, Father David Couturier. I share Mirus’s assessment that “one is at times unsure exactly what Fr. Couturier means,” but some of his points do seem at odds with the vision of charity articulated by, for example, Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est, as Mirus points out.

Read more on Subsidiarity Inverted…

A press release from the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, linked over at WorldMagBlog, claims that the bankruptcy reform legislation passed last year is being “reluctantly” interpreted by the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of New York to mean that “those going through bankruptcy may not tithe to their church or make other charitable donations … until after they have paid off credit card companies and other creditors. Before the new law went into effect, bankruptcy court judges were required to permit debtors to tithe a portion of their income on a regular basis.”

Read more on Rendering to Caesar, God, and MasterCard…

Christian geneticist and author (The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Simon & Schuster Trade Sales) Dr. Francis Collins is the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Human Genome Research Institute and head of the Human Genome Project.

Read more on Francis Collins – A Believer Looks at the Human Genome…

Voltaire had a saying: “The perfect is the enemy of the good,” or, “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.”

It’s often repeated, especially in public policy circles, that the perfect the enemy of the good, implying that you should favor the realistic good that can be done rather than the unattainable perfect ideal.

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The only way that culture can be truly changed, in terms of the gospel, is by movements of the Spirit that are birthed in congregational life. The Christian Right thinks that it can alter culture by direct partisan political pressure led by media personalities and tried-and-true techniques. They could not be more sadly mistaken. The failure of this approach is self-evident over the course of the past six years. The late missional theologian Lesslie Newbigin understood this well when he concluded:

Read more on How a Missional Perspective Changes Culture…

I haven’t started Marvin Olasky’s new book yet, but here’s a bit from the abstract of a new NBER paper, “Rules Rather Than Discretion: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina,” by Howard Kunreuther and Mark Pauly. Speaking of property owners who suffer severe damage and don’t have the resources to rebuild:

Read more on Ex Ante vs. Ex Post Government Action…