Dirt… we sweep our floors, wipe our shoes, and wash our clothes to get rid of it. But how often do we stop and reflect upon the very fact that without soil life would not be possible?

Read more on Day of Discovery interviews Acton Expert about dirt…

Jay W. Richards, Research Fellow and Director of Acton Media, was interviewed for a story in the Grand Rapids Press on the topic of religious and nonreligious views.

The article, written in light of outspoken atheist Bill Maher’s new movie, looks at differing views of people such as Christopher Hitchens and John Ortberg.

Read more on Richards’ debate featured in The Grand Rapids Press…

Speaking of the Nazis, I highly recommend Heiko A. Oberman’s essay, “From Luther to Hitler,” contained in the posthumously published The Two Reformations (Yale University Press, 2003). The piece is short and pointed, well worth the read, and just one of a number of excellent essays in that collection.

Read more on A ‘Nazi Think Tank’…

Mark your calendars! Jennifer Roback Morse is coming to Grand Rapids to speak at Aquinas College on Wednesday, November 19 at 7:00pm.

Dr. Morse will speak on the topic of her provocative new book, Smart Sex: Finding Life-Long Love in a Hook-Up World.

Read more on Jennifer Roback Morse to speak in Grand Rapids…

What is the root cause of the sub-prime crisis shaking the global economy? We need to know so we don’t allow it to screw up our economy even worse.

Many point to dishonesty and poor judgment on Wall Street. There was plenty of that leading up to the near-trillion dollar bailout, and even now the stock market is busily disciplining stupid, dishonest companies.

Others point to the many people who falsified loan applications to get mortgages beyond their means. That too played a role.

But dishonesty and poor judgment are as old as Adam and Eve. Something more was at work in the present crisis, a crisis of unprecedented scope. Why didn’t profit-minded loan companies run thorough credit checks? Why did they keep pumping out low interest loans to high risk borrowers, ignoring the risks?

It’s as if somebody spiked the financial system’s punch bowl with stupid juice, driving normally prudent financiers to dash, en masse, over the cliff.

It seems that way because it is that way. The brewers of the stupid juice were largely (if not exclusively) politicians in Washington who sought to redistribute wealth from the rich and middle class to poor people with bad credit. These politicians fostered various laws and institutions that directed, cajoled and legally bullied mortgage companies to extend big loans to people with little credit.

A case in point is a group called ACORN—Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Stanley Kurtz explains in an Oct. 7 essay at National Review Online:

“You’ve got only a couple thousand bucks in the bank. Your job pays you dog-food wages. Your credit history has been bent, stapled, and mutilated. You declared bankruptcy in 1989. Don’t despair: You can still buy a house.” So began an April 1995 article in the Chicago Sun-Times that went on to direct prospective home-buyers fitting this profile to a group of far-left “community organizers” called ACORN, for assistance. In retrospect, of course, encouraging customers like this to buy homes seems little short of madness.

… At the time, however, that 1995 Chicago newspaper article represented something of a triumph for Barack Obama. That same year, as a director at Chicago’s Woods Fund, Obama was successfully pushing for a major expansion of assistance to ACORN, and sending still more money ACORN’s way from his post as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Through both funding and personal-leadership training, Obama supported ACORN. And ACORN, far more than we’ve recognized up to now, had a major role in precipitating the subprime crisis.

Read more on The Credit Crisis: Who Brewed the Stupid Juice?…

There’s an interesting clip on YouTube of a discussion about the world food situation between, primarily, author Michal Pollan and Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant.

Pollan is a champion of the “slow food” movement, which is, to simplify, associated more generally with trends such as whole foods, farmers markets (“localvores”), organic food production, etc. (The participation of otherwise fiscal and cultural conservatives in what is often presented as a left-leaning movement is a phenomenon that gave rise to the term “crunchy cons.”)

Read more on Feeding the World…

In the sixth Birth of Freedom video short, William B. Allen addresses the question, “What was Christianity’s Role in the rise of the idea of human equality?” In his discussion, which traces the Judeo-Christian origins of a “universal perspective,” he concludes that “what informs the spirit of Republicanism in the modern era, is this long development, this slow working-out of a specific revelation from God that leads human beings into the discovery of the fullness of their personality in the recognition of their universal status.”

Read more on Birth of Freedom Shorts Series: Christianity and Human Equality…

It looks to me like Obama has this election about wrapped up. Why?

Some of his opponents are resorting to the tired and fallacious reductio ad Hitlerum (aka argumentum ad Hitlerum).

Read more on The Reductio ad Hitlerum…

From Christian Newswire:

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., Oct. 2 /Christian Newswire/ — The John Jay Institute, a para-academic leadership development center based in downtown Colorado Springs, is pleased to announce a partnership with the Acton Institute, Grand Rapids, Michigan, to premiere the historical documentary film, “The Birth of Freedom” in Colorado.

Read more on John Jay Institute, Acton Partner in Film Premiere…

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s Secretary of State and effectively the second most important official in the Catholic Church, has written a new book titled, “L’etica del Bene Comune nella Dottrina Sociale della Chiesa” (The Ethics of the Common Good in the Social Doctrine of the Church), with a preface from the Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad. The edition contains the Italian and Russian texts side-by-side, but it has not yet appeared in English though the Zenit News Agency has reported on the book’s presentation in Moscow.

Read more on Review: Cardinal Bertone on Catholic social doctrine…