Our series on the year in review continues with the second quarter:
April
“Surprise! Evangelical Politics Isn’t Univocal,” Jordan J. Ballor
So from issues like immigration to global warming, the press is eager to find the fault lines of evangelical politics. And moving beyond the typical Jim Wallis-Jerry Falwell dichotomy, there are real and honest disagreements among evangelicals on any number of political issues….
This series will take a representative post from each month of the past year, to review the big stories of the past twelve months. First things first, the first quarter of 2006:
Rev. Robert A. Sirico, president of the Acton Institute, passes along a Christmas message over at Phi Beta Cons on National Review Online. Reflecting on the Incarnation, Sirico says, “This belief teaches us to take seriously human history, its institutions, economies and social relationships, for all of this, and more, is the stuff from which human destiny is discovered and directed.”
A climatologist reflects on his visit to AGU’s conference last week. Salient bit here:
What I see is something that I am having a hard time labeling, but that I might call either a "hangover" or a "sophomore slump" or "buyers remorse." None fit perfectly, but perhaps the combination does. I speak for (my interpretation) of the collective: {We tried for years – decades – to get them to listen to us about climate change. To do that we had to ramp up our rhetoric. We had to figure out ways to tone down our natural skepticism (we are scientists, after all) in order to put on a united face. We knew it would mean pushing the science harder than it should be. We knew it would mean allowing the boundary-pushers on the "it’s happening" side free reign while stifling the boundary-pushers on the other side. But knowing the science, we knew the stakes to humanity were high and that the opposition to the truth would be fierce, so we knew we had to dig in. But now they are listening. Now they do believe us. Now they say they’re ready to take action. And now we’re wondering if we didn’t create a monster.
I like this feature on John Scharffenberger in this week’s U.S. News and World Report. It captures in anecdotal form almost all of the ingredients in entrepreneurial success. There is disregard for “conventional wisdom” and there is hard work and dedication. The author doesn’t articulate it this way, but there is also an ethical concern for quality product and the good of the customer. Entrepreneurial success isn’t as simple as all that, however. There is also “luck and timing,” and, without explicitly drawing attention to the fact, there is also the assistance of existing financial resources to draw on. The story is at once edifying and realistic, an excellent piece of business journalism by Kim Clark.
New President of Mexico Calderon spent yesterday at the US Mexican border greeting Mexicans returning home for Christmas. His message was two-fold. First, a pledge to create jobs in Mexico:
“The generation of well-paid jobs is the only long-lasting solution to the migration problem,” Calderón said before greeting immigrants in cars packed with Christmas gifts.
I was glad to see a group of American Muslims register their objection to the Iranian government’s Holocaust Denial conference. A group of Muslims went to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. The Muslims were members of All Dulles Area Muslim Society. Holocaust survivors also attended the ceremony.
over at National Review Online.
Rev. Robert Sirico examines the nature of giving, which keeps us all so busy during this Christmas season. “Without exchange, without private property and a moral sense of its foundation, giving would be limited, impossible or morally dubious,” he writes.
Just say “No!” to corporate welfare. That’s a pretty good motto, I think.
And it seems that one form of corporate welfare, the vast system of farm subsidies, is getting some increased critical mainstream coverage. In today’s WaPo appears a story with this headline: “Federal Subsidies Turn Farms Into Big Business.”
