From Herman Bavinck:

Even a freedom that cannot be obtained and enjoyed aside from the danger of licentiousness and caprice is still always to be preferred over a tyranny that suppresses liberty. In the creation of humanity, God himself chose this way of freedom, which carried with it the danger and actually the fact of sin as well, in preference to forced subjection. Even now, in ruling the world and governing the church, God still follows this royal road of liberty. It is precisely his honor that through freedom he nevertheless reaches his goal, creating order out of disorder, light from darkness, a cosmos out of chaos.

—Prolegomena, vol. 1, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), p. 479.

In today’s Times of London, William Rees-Mogg writes about the Vatican and its apparent rejection of intelligent design.

Rees-Mogg also makes this provocative claim about Pope Benedict and some possible surprises from this new pontificate:

His critics had expected him to be more conservative than his predecessor. I tended to share this expectation myself, but refrained from expressing it because new leaders always surprise one; they move in directions no one had previously foreseen. We should have been more conscious of differences between the national traditions of the Catholic Church in Poland and in Germany. The Polish Church, which trained John-Paul II, had always combined conservative theology with support for the national claims to liberty. The German Church has always been challenged by the modernism of German theology.

In the 16th century Germany was the region where the Reformation happened. German theologians on the Roman Catholic side had to understand the arguments of the Reformers if they were to reply to them. In the 18th century Germans were fully exposed to the French Enlightenment. In the 19th century they were exposed to German philosophers such as Hegel, and to the challenge of German biblical scholarship. Modernism itself in the late 19th century had a great influence on German Catholic opinion.

Martin Heidegger

Anyone who has spent some time around theology or philosophy faculties in Rome can attest to this influence, but it hasn’t always been a positive one for the Church. (I’ve met Heideggerian priests!)

It should make for an exciting first encyclical, which some media reports say will be published December 8.

For those of us who harbor some nostalgic sentiment for this country’s agrarian past…

I’ve written previously about the corrosive effect of subsidies on American agriculture. Now, Denis Boyles, in a thoughtful piece on NRO, notes from a similar perspective the importance of entrepreneurial thinking in preserving the agricultural towns of rural America.

Here’s one piece:

When I asked Genna M. Hurd, the co-director of the Kansas Center for Community Economic Development at the University of Kansas and an expert in rural communities, what made the difference between a town that lived and a town that died, I expected her to give me the old saw about how it takes a school to save a town. Instead, she answered simply, “Local leadership and vision.”

Joe Carter, purveyor of the evangelical outpost (and, incidentally, now the managing editor for WorldMagBlog), had a discussion last week worth paying attention to on the specifically Christian pursuit of knowledge. He argues that this applies even in something so apparently noncontroversial as mathematics. Regarding questions of math and science, “Even the concept that 1 + 1 = 2, which almost all people agree with on a surface level, has different meanings based on what theories are proposed as answers,” he writes.

He also passes along the view of Leibniz:

When Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, an inventor of the calculus, was asked by one of his students, “Why is one and one always two, and how do we know this?” Leibnitz replied, “One and one equals two is an eternal, immutable truth that would be so whether or not there were things to count or people to count them.” Numbers, numerical relationships, and mathematical laws (such as the law of addition) exist in this abstract realm and are independent of any physical existence. In Leibnitz’s view, numbers are real things that exist in a dimension outside of the physical realm and would exist even if no human existed to recognize them.

This also happens to be the view espoused by Alvin Plantinga in a brief discussion at Calvin Theological Seminary last Thursday on his book, Warranted Christian Belief, although Plantinga discussed “things that exist in a dimension outside of the physical realm” in terms of possible worlds as thoughts of God.

On a somewhat related note, I’d like to pass along some words from Basil of Caesarea on the applicability of arithmetic to a discussion of the Trinity. We might ask, “What is divine math?”

Basil writes in his treatise On the Holy Spirit,

Count, if you must; but you must not by counting do damage to the faith. Either let the ineffable be honoured by silence; or let holy things be counted consistently with true religion. There is one God and Father, one Only-begotten, and one Holy Ghost. We proclaim each of the hypostases singly; and, when count we must, we do not let an ignorant arithmetic carry us away to the idea of a plurality of Gods. For we do not count by way of addition, gradually making increase from unity to multitude, and saying one, two, and three,—nor yet first, second, and third. (Ꝅ—45)

By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

Hebrews 11:3 NIV

The Kill Malarial Mosquitoes NOW! coalition announced today that Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu has endorsed the campaign to use DDT as a primary weapon in the fight to control and eliminate malaria. The coalition wants 2/3 of world’s malaria control funds to be spent on DDT, or any more cost-effective insecticide, plus artemisia-based combination therapies (ACTs).

Archbishop Tutu describes malaria as a “devastating” disease that is holding back African development.

Many African countries desperately need cost-effective insecticides, such as DDT, to battle the deadly mosquitoes that transmit the disease. It is a human tragedy that children die largely because donors fail to support appropriate and effective solutions to this preventable disease.

Read more on this important issue and the latest list of endorsers of the KMMN declaration.

Aaah, the magical soothing balm that is government regulation!

The delightfully titled Now Batting for Pedro Borbon blog (“Manny Mota…Mota…Mota”) reveals the (predictable) results of governmental efforts to “increase transparency” in the business world:

So, let’s review. The law that was supposed to ensure greater transparency and make the stock market safe for all of us, especially the little guy, is driving companies to purge the little guy, become less transparent, and shun our world-class public capital markets.

Score another beaut for the Great Sausage Factory!

“We’re from the government, and we’re here to help you,” indeed…

Regardless, it seems to me that this is yet another opportunity to reflect on the importance of maintaining ethical business practices in both large and small corporations. As you recall, Sarbanes-Oxley was the congressional response to the various Enron-Worldcom type business accounting scandals in the late 90′s. Those scandals – a result of a distinct lack of ethical practices – resulted in a lot of people losing a lot of money, public distrust of corporations, and a resulting governmental response to the public outcry. The final links in this chain of events include massive new costs for businesses in order to comply with the new regulations, and now the phenomenon noted above. In other words, everyone loses. Returning to and reinforcing core ethical principles, however, creates a situation in which everyone can win.

A story on today’s Morning Edition by Claudio Sanchez examines the future of the school system in New Orleans following the hurricane Katrina disaster. New Orleans school superintendent Ora Watson complains that charter schools are stepping in to fill the void left when public schools were cancelled for the remainder of this school year.

She says, “There are so many different agendas. The mayor has decided that the city can run 20 schools under a charter. We have individual schools going to individual groups saying, ‘Would you charter me?’ They’re picking the school district apart. This is a real, real frustration.” Of course it’s easy to see why this would be a “real frustrating” for someone with a vested bureaucratic interest in maintaining the pre-Katrina state of publicly administered education in New Orleans.

According to the report, Watson worries that New Orleans could be the “first urban school system in America to be taken over by special interest groups.” I assume she means special interest groups other than the National Education Association.

Listen to the rest of the report for other viewpoints on reconstructing education in New Orleans. In many ways, the disaster can be viewed as an opportunity to improve a broken and failing system.

It’s clear that superintendent Watson is ardently opposed to introducing a principle of freedom of choice and competition into the system. For more on how competition, rightly practiced, can work in the educational arena, see this interview with J. C. Huizenga, chairman of the National Heritage Academies.

Jordan Ballor, associate editor at the Acton Institute, responds to a study published by Joan Silk, a researcher at the University of California, which finds that monkeys do not exercise compassion.

Silk’s team placed a chimp in a situation where it had the option of pulling one of two ropes. Pull the first rope, and the chimp received a bit of food. Pull the second rope, and the chimp received the same bit of food, but a monkey in a neighboring cage also received a similarly-sized morsel.

What Silk found was that “the chimps were entirely indifferent” to the situation of their neighbor. They pulled the first rope about half the time, and the rest of the time they pulled the other. And this indifference was manifested even though the neighboring chimp would often plead or implore its potential benefactor to pull the second rope. “They had their face right up there sometimes. But the begging gestures don’t seem to have had a big impact on the chimp’s behavior,” Silk said.

Ballor reflects on Silk’s research, commenting that “even though not all humans act compassionately, and perhaps not all animals act selfishly, the important reality to recognize is that we necessarily make moral conclusions about such behavior.” Selfless compassion, says Ballor, is a manifestation of the imago dei: “We were built for a purpose, to love God by loving our neighbor.”

Read the full commentary here.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Americans living in Europe were often scolded about the need for big, centralized government to look after the poor, and we heard yet again about the moral superiority of Europe’s social model over America’s market-driven one.

People who follow the Acton Institute and read the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page are too smart and well-informed to fall for such bromides. The American Entreprise magazine also devoted a whole issue debunking Europe’s claims.

But when mainstream publications such as Newsweek International can see the hypocrisy and obvious failings of European protectionism, we may be reaching a tipping point.

This week’s edition has an article on Europe’s increasing reluctance to expand global trade. The biggest culprits are France, Germany and Italy, the continent’s three largest economies but whose political classes, whether they be of the left or of the right, are beholden to trade unions and other opponents of increased competition. (The U.S. Congress is not spared deserved criticism, either.)

Part of the socialist mystique is that the poor are too vulnerable to survive market changes – but the Newsweek article shows how the poor also have the most to gain from increased trade. Europeans must start to understand that this affects not only the poor in Africa and Asia but in their own countries as well.

As Tony Blair recently told the European Parliament, “What type of social model is it that has 20 million unemployed?”