The Sad Secular Monks
Leah Libresco, First Things

Most careers aren’t vocations, so we need space outside them to grow and love.

Study: Less religious states give less to charity
Associated Press

Read more on PowerLinks – 08.28.12…

As the Presidential debates draw near, there is one question that tops my wish list of questions that should (but won’t be) asked of the candidates: What income range constitutes “middle class”?

This undefined group of citizens seems to be a favorite of politicians on both ends of the political spectrum. Reagan and Bush cut their taxes. Clinton too. And Obama promised not to raise their taxes. But who are these people? Ask the janitor sweeping your company’s floors and he’ll likely tell you he’s in ‘middle class.’ Query the vice-president of marketing and he will give you the same answer. The single girls down in accounts payable and the married attorneys in the legal department will give the same response. In the land of equal opportunity, it appears, we’re almost all middle class.

A new survey by the Pew Research Center confirms that almost half (49%) of adult Americans say they are in the middle class. But as Catherine Rampell notes, there is a wide variety of responses about what a family of four needed to earn to maintain a “middle-class lifestyle.”

Read more on Who Counts as Middle Class?…

Marvin Olasky, a Senior Fellow in Acton’s Research Department, has an article in World Magazine regarding evangelism and effective economic development in Ghana. There is an effort to teach strategic economic skills to budding entrepreneurs incorporating a wholistic approach, combining not only economic lessons, but spiritual ones as well.

Read more on ‘We have no excuse for our poverty. We will not advance without integrity and compassion.’…

HHS Mandate “Serious” Threat to Religious Liberty
Ken McIntyre, The Foundry

Are the concerns of religious employers about a mandate from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) simply a matter of getting “all worked up over nothing,” a new video asks, as the Obama Administration suggests?

Read more on PowerLinks – 08.27.12…

Order matters. So much in life builds on what has come before and prepares us for those things that are in our future. So it is no accident that Sunday comes before Monday. Since the Early Church, Sunday has been both the first day of the week and the day of rest and worship for Christians around the world.

But have we stopped to ask why God gave us Sunday before Monday? What is supposed to happen on that first day of the week, and how should it impact the subsequent days? It is easy to live a life without making those connections. We silo our time between weekend and weekday. Our understanding of the spiritual is carefully kept within the confines of our devotional time and our Sunday worship experience.

Read more on What is the 2nd Day Without the 1st?…

In his magnificent reflection on the nature of art, Real Presences, polymath George Steiner invites us to make a thought experiment: What if we lived in a city where all talk about art, mere talk about art, was prohibited? In other words, what would follow if we did away with artistic criticism qua criticism, an activity derivative by nature and one Steiner calls “high gossip”? In this posited city, what Steiner calls the Answerable City, the only permitted response to a work of art would be another work of art. Thus participation in the “art scene” could never launch itself from the risk-free loft of criticism, but it must be real participation, a participation that demands that the viewer invest something of his own imaginative capacities. In this city, the word “interpretation” denotes not something exegetical, but something performative; an activity not of professional academics or theater critics, but of actors and directors — as in an actor “interprets a role.” Here, art means incarnation, not judgment.

But such a city is only a thought experiment, and since judgment requires the participant to invest less of himself, it will always be easier to be a critic than to be an artist. And therefore the artist will always be tempted first to pass judgment rather than to respond with his own creativity.

After a decade of trying to walk the slippery ridge between “he who does” and “he who discusses” art, I have tried to avoid criticism these last couple of years to focus only on doing. But I feel the need to again jump into the critical ring, thanks to a recent article in GQ Magazine (it was sent to me by a friend), an article on my own town, Grand Rapids, and its increasingly famous festival, ArtPrize. Read more on The Corruptions of Power: Gossip of the Highest Sort…

At the Mackinac Center blog, I look at a really shabby piece of reportage in GQ Magazine on ArtPrize, the annual public art competition in Grand Rapids, Mich. Grand Rapids is also where the Acton Institute is based and it’s a terrific Midwestern city doing a lot of things right. But when East Coast writer Matthew Power visited GR he saw only “flyover country,” a “provincial” mindset, “G.R.-usalem” (lots of churches) and “ordinary” local inhabitants.

Read more on GQ, ArtPrize and ‘Flyover Country’…

After relating how city regulations in Chattanooga, Tenn., helped kill a small business, economist Mark J. Perry offers a sympathetic sentiment for failed entrepreneurs:

To paraphrase President Obama:

Look, if you’ve been unsuccessful, you didn’t get there on your own. If you were unsuccessful at opening or operating a small business, some government official along the line probably contributed to your failure. There was an overzealous civil servant somewhere who might have stood in your way with unreasonable regulations that are part of our American system of anti-business red tape that allowed you to not thrive. Taxpayers invested in roads and bridges, but you might have faced city council members who wouldn’t allow you to use them. If you’ve been forced to close a business – it’s often the case that you didn’t do that on your own. Somebody else made that business closing happen or prevented it from opening in the first place. You can thank the bureaucratic tyrants of the nanny state.

Read more on You Didn’t Kill That Business On Your Own…

Is Totalitarian Liberalism A Mutant Form of Christianity?
Tracey Rowland, Crisis Magazine

In a post-Christian world gods don’t disappear. Christ is simply replaced by the apparatus of the nation-state. Political leaders assume to themselves the powers and prerogatives formerly associated with deities, above all, powers over life and death and reproduction.

Read more on PowerLinks – 08.24.12…

Book Review: “Ferguson on Green, Pauper Capital”
David R. Green. Pauper Capital. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010. Reviewed by Christopher Ferguson (Auburn University)

The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, more commonly known as the New Poor Law, is arguably the most notorious piece of legislation in British history. Deeply controversial in its day, it has unsurprisingly generated a dense and diverse scholarly literature ever since, yet one in which the national capital has played a remarkably minor role. Indeed, David R. Green’s study is the first to attempt to explore the history of the Poor Law in nineteenth-century London in its geographic and administrative entirety. One need not read far to understand why, for the history of the Poor Law in London prior to and post 1834 is enormously complex. Green is to be commended both for undertaking a difficult task and for producing a study that is remarkably easy to read, despite the intricacies of its subject matter. His study makes the arcane history of poor relief in nineteenth-century London accessible to the non-specialist, while simultaneously yielding significant insights about this history for specialist scholars of poverty, policy, and the nineteenth-century British state.

Job: “Assistant Professor, History of Capitalism in Modern America, Brown University”

Read more on ResearchLinks – 08.24.12…