Director of Research Samuel Gregg has written a special report for the American Spectator about Benedict XVI’s upcoming trip to Germany. The recent World Youth Day in Spain may have looked like a bigger challenge for Benedict, but Gregg says that Germany, while its economy looks good, is facing rough seas ahead.
Read more on Samuel Gregg: Pope’s Work Cut out for Him in Germany…
Five years ago today, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a talk titled “Faith, Reason and the University” at the University of Regensburg in Germany. The lecture set off a firestorm of controversy concerning Christian-Muslim relations. On National Review Online, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg reflects, noting that calling it “one of this century’s pivotal speeches is probably an understatement.”
Read more on Samuel Gregg: Looking Back on Benedict’s Regensburg Speech…
The folks over at Think Christian asked me to write up a response to President Obama’s jobs speech from last Thursday. That response is now up over at the TC site, “The misplaced faith of Obama’s job speech.”
Rev. Robert A. Sirico has lent his voice to Dave Ramsey’s new project The Great Recovery. The sound finance guru is leading a grassroots movement based on the principle that economic recovery cannot be a top-down, Washington-directed endeavor. Rather, our economy “will be restored one family at a time, as each of us takes a stand to return to God and grandma’s way of handling money.”
Read more on VIDEO: Rev. Sirico on Dave Ramsey’s ‘Great Recovery’…
Justin Constantine has written an excellent piece on the high cost of war in the Atlantic titled “Wounded in Iraq: A Marine’s Story.”
Constantine, who was shot in the head in Iraq, notes in his essay,
Over at National Review Online, a panel of experts reacts to last night’s jobs speech by President Obama. Acton’s director of research, Samuel Gregg, was not encouraged by what he heard: a jumble of disproven Keynesian theories and strong-man rhetoric. Gregg’s commentary in full:
The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity
Russell Roberts
Princeton University Press (2008); 224 pages; $9.69
Reviewed by Stephen Schmalhofer
I hated freshman economics at Yale. It was the only C I ever received. Taught in a massive lecture hall, the professor posted endless equations and formulas. I found it sterile and artificial. My father was the CEO of a poultry company in rural Pennsylvania. I wandered the production facility as a child and saw chickens hatched in Pennsylvania out of eggs from Ohio, fed soybeans from Brazil in German-designed storage tanks, transported by trucks assembled in Detroit and Kentucky, processed by special machinery built in the Netherlands and operated by workers from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and finally shipped around the world. They even sold the feet to China!
Union leaders have been jockeying for position ahead of President Obama’s “jobs speech,” since the proposals he makes will be big opportunities for organized labor. AFL-CIO head Dick Trumka has asked the president to spend with abandon, and has reminded him rather ominously, “This is going to be a moment in history when our members are going to judge him.” Teamsters boss James Hoffa has called for the President to force companies with cash in the bank to spend that money on new hires.
Awhile back someone questioned the scholarly credibility of the Acton Institute on the Emerging Scholars Network (ESN) Facebook page in connection with one of our student award programs, specifically contending the institute is “not scholarly.” To be sure, not everything the institute does is academic or scholarly.
Read more on Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Acton Institute…
In this week’s Acton Commentary, “Work and Prayer: Of Coins, Sheep, and Men,” I explore what the parable of the Prodigal Son (when read in conjunction with the parables of the Lost Coin and the Lost Sheep) has to teach us about stewardship:
