The Presidential Bible Class
Tevi Troy, Wall Street Journal

Abraham Lincoln’s diligent reading of the Good Book informed the Gettysburg Address.

The HHS Mandate Meets an Immovable Object
Ken Starr, National Review Online

RFRA was written to be easily strong enough to favor Hobby Lobby.

Yes, the Wealthy Can Be Deserving
N. Gregory Mankiw, New York Times

A fact that’s lost in the inequality debate: The top 1 percent of wage earners often accomplish extraordinary things, and at great risk.

Adoption and Foster Care: An Issue We Can’t Ignore
Kristie Eshelman, Values & Capitalism

“Not everyone can adopt,” Graham noted, “but everyone can care for a child in need,” by supporting a foster care family, financially or otherwise.

Why do liberal and conservative evangelicals tend to disagree so often about economic issues? This is the fifth and final entry in a series of posts that addresses that question by examining 12 principles that generally drive the thinking of conservative evangelicals when it comes to economics. The first in the series can be found here; Part 2 can be found here; and Part 3 can be found here; Part 4 can be found here. A PDF/text version of the entire series can be found here.

11. Free markets are information systems designed for virtuous people.

All self-identified evangelicals share at least one trait in common: we self-identify with the information system that goes by the name of evangelicalism. That tautology – the people who self-identify as evangelicals are the people who self-identify with evangelicalism – may not be very useful, but it can be helpful for us to recognize that evangelicalism is an information system that we share in common.

To claim that evangelicalism is an information system is merely to say that (whatever else it may be) evangelicalism provides a systematic means of creating, collecting, filtering, processing, and distributing information about a particular form of Christianity.
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Earlier this week I reviewed Defiant, the riveting new book by Alvin Townley. Admiral James B. Stockdale (1923-2005) is a principal figure in Townley’s account about POWs in North Vietnam. Stockdale’s famous to many for being Ross Perot’s vice-presidential running mate in 1992. He was widely ridiculed for his rather clumsy and cluttered performance in the debate. Republican political consultant Ed Rollins offered this marked observation of the debate in his book Bare Knuckles and Backrooms:

Of all of the political injustices in my lifetime, what happened to Jim Stockdale was the greatest. Congress should pass a law requiring every person who laughed at him during the vice-presidential debate to read the citation that explains why Stockdale received the Medal of Honor for his conduct as a senior prisoner of war in Hanoi for more than eight years. This man is a great academic scholar, a true war hero, and a wonderful human being – the best the military and this country has to offer. He deserved better.

While the citation testifies alone to his impeccable leadership, Townley’s book made me dig out my copy of Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot by Stockdale. I shared these poignant comments by Stockdale on public virtue and our federal debt on the Powerblog in 2009. The book is a gem, and it’s worth sharing a few of his thoughts on morality and leadership, especially since the trait is clearly lacking by so many of our leaders today.
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The most recent issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality, vol. 16, no. 2, has been published online at our website (here). This issue’s articles explore a range of subjects from biblical understandings of poverty, Islamic scripture, John Locke, the ills of apathy, an Eastern Orthodox view of the family and social justice, and much more.

In addition, this issue includes our regular symposium of the papers from the Theology of Work Consultation at the Evangelical Theological Society’s 2012 conference.

2013 marked several important anniversaries, as executive editor Jordan Ballor points out in his editorial, (more…)

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, I offer this wonderful bit from Jennifer Roback Morse’s transformational book, Love and Economics, in which she observes a particular vacancy in modern discourse and policymaking:

Economics has been a successful social science because it focuses on things that are true: human beings are self-interested and have the capacity for reason. But it is equally true that we have the capacity to love. This capacity is no less human, and no less defining of who we are. Too much of our public discourse has proceeded as if these two great realities of the human condition, reason and love, were in conflict with each other. The Right favors the cold, calculating, tough-minded approach of the intellect: man is essentially a Knower. The Left favors the warm, fuzzy, emotional approach of the heart: man is essentially a Lover. Yet the Left at its most extreme has given us the cold, impersonal state and its bureaucracy as the answer to social problems. At the same time, the Right at its most extreme has given us the irrationality of trying to reduce man to the sum of his bodily needs…

…It is time to cross this divide in the sphere of public discourse as well. The consequences of going off the deep end into either the direction of Love or Reason and ignoring the other can be grim indeed.

Noting the French Revolution’s bloody altar to the “Goddess of Reason,” and, somewhat inversely, the Russian Revolution’s chaotic attempt to unite humanity under “one giant family,” Morse argues that the American Revolution was distinct because it preserved the “underlying social and cultural order.” It unleashed the powerful forces of freedom and individualism, but did so in a way that kept love for the other in focus. (more…)

In Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, Matthew Dalton reported that the European Union likely will approve a genetically modified organism for only the second time in the past 15 years. The EU is poised to grant E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company permission to grow 1507, a DuPont-developed GMO corn.

DuPont first sought approval in 2001 for 1507 … After positive safety reviews and several decisions by the European Court of Justice criticizing the European Commission for delaying its decision, the commission is now close to approving the crop…

The crop ‘meets all EU regulatory requirements and should be approved for cultivation without further delay,’ DuPont said. (more…)

Kishore Jayabalan, Director of Istituto Acton in Rome, recently interviewed with the BBC to discuss Pope Francis’ views on poverty and economics as the pope enters the second year of his papacy. Enjoy the report via the audio player below.