12 year old girls are a lot of things, but keenly aware of their own bodies, biological functions and the side effects of medications are typically not among their strong suits. Imagine a 12 year old girl who isn’t even sure how she might get pregnant, let alone if she is. Imagine a 12 year old who’s been coerced into having sex or has even been raped. Imagine she may or may not be pregnant, but has contracted an STD and doesn’t know it. Imagine she’s so afraid of being pregnant that she takes the ‘morning-after’ medication 2 or 3 times, “just to be sure.” Imagine the harm being done to her young body and mind, with no counsel from a parent and a medical professional. In fact, the parents have no rights here, despite the fact that there are only five states in the U.S. that do not have laws regarding piercings and/or tattoos for minors. The Obama administration has decided that a child facing an unplanned pregnancy needs less parental supervision than one who wants to get a nose ring. (more…)

Christians face being driven from the Middle East
Simon Kent, Toronto Sun

Fr. Peter-Michael Preble says “the entire Judeo-Christian heritage that once underpinned the region is threatened with collapse.”

‘Environmental Justice,’ EPA Style
Steven F. Hayward, The American

If the EPA wants to help low-income and minority populations, it should stick to promoting technologies that reduce pollution for everyone, rather than making environmental issues about racial justice.

The Unintended Consequences of Granting Home Schooling Family Asylum
Aaron Goldstein, The American Spectator

Even if you disagree with the German law prohibiting homeschooling, it is a law that is applied to anyone who wasn’t sending their children to school be they religious or not. Christians aren’t being singled out under this law.

A Guide to the 2013 Medicare Trustees Report
Charles Blahous, e21

Medicare’s HI trust fund, which finances hospital, home health following hospital stays, skilled nursing facility and hospice care services, is only one piece of a larger Medicare program and indeed represents less than half of total program costs.

The University of Manchester has announced plans to digitize the holdings of the Cardinal Newman archive. Among the roughly 200,000 items of handwritten and other unpublished materials are 171 files of letters to (and from) “particular individual correspondents.”

One such correspondent of particular interest is Lord Acton. A selection of Acton’s correspondence with Newman is available digitally courtesy of the Online Library of Liberty. Lord Acton’s periodical, The Rambler, is also the subject of seven separate files of Newman’s correspondence “concerned with various specific issues,” according to the checklist available from the national archives (PDF).

More information on the digitization project is available from the National Institute for Newman Studies, and project updates are available here.

For more on liberalism and the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century, see The Acton-Newman Relations: The Dilemma of Christian Liberalism, by Hugh A. MacDougall (Fordham University Press, 1962). 

National Catholic Reporter writer Michael Sean Winters has a message for the United States Catholic Bishops: become complicit with evil or toll the death knell for the Church in the U.S. Unlike the Amish, who choose to live in a manner outside of modern culture, Winters exhorts the bishops to not only engage the world, but realize that being part of evil is simply part and parcel of that engagement:

I bring up the Amish for a reason. They are lovely people and their commitment to living a Christ-like life challenges us all. But their model is not our Catholic tradition. We do not shut out the world; we engage it. And it seems to me that the approach of many bishops in recent years has been to mimic the Amish, to construct walls around a ‘faithful remnant’ of Catholics, close the doors in the face of those who evidence ambivalence, and denounce the culture for its moral turpitude. Setting aside the fact that those denunciations tend to be ideologically one-sided, this dour, pessimistic, denunciatory stance toward the culture is a death sentence for the church…

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Over at the Institute for Work, Faith and Economics, Dr. Vincent Bacote follows up on a previous post on business as Christian cultural engagement, explaining how such engagement needn’t be separated from our view of discipleship:

If we regard discipleship as the “spiritual” part of our life, we are certainly correct that it has everything to do with how we relate to God in our internal life. We would also have only a partial understanding of the extent of discipleship.

Jesus came pronouncing the arrival of the Kingdom of God, a reign that will ultimately be both in the hearts of people and the very structure of society itself. As we wait for the fullness of the Kingdom to arrive, we live as followers of Jesus who call him “Lord.” This means that he reigns over everything, including our external, every day lives beyond Sunday worship.

To be a disciple is to be a truly spiritual person, where “spiritual” does not mean “non-material” but directed by the Holy Spirit (Romans 8:3-16; Galatians 5:17-19)…Christian disciples are people who pursue all of life with and under the Lordship of Christ. The fact of Christ’s Lordship does not equate to churches micromanaging the business affairs of congregants, but it should mean that churches are helping businesspeople have an increasingly greater vision for how their “business life” is an expression of the rich life of discipleship.

Indeed, and just as churches mustn’t speak only to a “spiritual” life apart from culture, those in business mustn’t see their work as only material or temporal in significance. Whatever earthbound benefits our business endeavors yield, being spirit-led in the work of our hands will make room for a host of spiritual contributions to the economy at large and those working within it. (more…)

Last week, 29-year-old Edward Snowden, a tech specialist who was contracted for the NSA and works for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, leaked the details of a classified surveillance program to the media. As Christians debate the ethics of Snowden’s actions we should consider the question, “Under what circumstances can there be biblically justified ‘leaking’ or whistleblowing?”

What does being a “good neighbor” or a “Good Samaritan” (ala Luke 10) mean, obligation-wise, when it comes to warning others against possible harm? If I have accurate and true knowledge about a situation that could result – or has already resulted in – public (or semi-public) harm, do I have an obligation to report it?

While the Bible doesn’t spell out the ethical obligations in these specific situations, the literature on justified whistleblowing tracks closely with another set of criteria many Christians apply to one specific intersection of ethics, “neighbor-love” (what Augustine called ‘caritas’) and public order: the just war tradition.

There are two distinct categories in the just war tradition – jus ad bellum (justice before war; or justice when initiating a war)  and jus en bello (justice in war, or justice in the process of waging war) — both of which are applicable to questions of whistleblowing.
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A Guide to the 2013 Social Security Trustees Report
Charles Blahous, e21

Social Security’s total financing shortfall is now larger than it has been at any point since the 1983 reforms, and indeed now requires legislative corrections more severe than those enacted at that time.

Rate Shock: In California, Obamacare To Increase Individual Health Insurance Premiums By 64-146%
Avik Roy, Forbes

One of the most serious flaws with Obamacare is that its blizzard of regulations and mandates drives up the cost of insurance for people who buy it on their own.

What Good are Foreign Aid and Humanitarian Intervention?
Luca Gattoni-Celli, The American Spectator

Humanitarian action, whether short-term aid after a crisis or long-term development assistance, is generally approached as a technical challenge. Economist Chris Coyne challenges this engineering mentality in his new book Doing Bad By Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails.

Religious Liberty and Complacent Christianity
Samuel Rodriguez, Christian Post

Silence is not an option. For with conviction and compassion we understand that a posture of complacency today will result in a position of captivity tomorrow.

Three years ago the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the same rights as individuals to engage in political speech. As Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the Citizens United decision, the “corporate identity” of a speaker did not justify a reduced level of free speech protection. Can that same concept about corporate identity be applied to religious liberties? Do corporations have religious liberty rights too?

Some legal scholars are claiming they do not:
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“How is religion related to entrepreneurial behavior?”

As Joe Carter pointed out last week, a new study by Baylor University sought to examine this very question.

Focusing specifically on American entrepreneurs, researchers Mitchell J. Neubert and Kevin Dougherty found that although entrepreneurs “appear no different than nonentrepreneurs in religious affiliation, belief in God, or religious service attendance,” they do “tend to see God as more personal, pray more frequently, and are more likely to attend a place of worship that encourages business activity.”

Baylor recently posted some interviews with the researchers to get their thoughts first-hand (HT). Dougherty, an associate professor of sociology, emphasizes that in a time of economic recovery, we should pay close attention to any area that might impact those looking to start a business:

We’re at a particularly important time for the promotion of entrepreneurship, coming out of a recession, not just in our country, but globally, so if there’s a time period where we need people engaging in new business creation, now is the time, and if religion has something to do with that, it’s important to know what that is and how that occurs.

Neubert, an associate professor of business and entrepreneurship, notes that although this particular study doesn’t get into why entrepreneurs pray more or what exactly they pray about, he hopes that future research will examine these areas more fully. (more…)

Many thanks to Ancient Faith Radio for graciously sharing its podcasts of the Conference on Poverty at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in Yonkers, N.Y. The May 31-June 1 event was co-hosted by the Acton Institute. The conference was offered as a tribute to Deacon John Zarras, a 2006 alumnus of the seminary who earned his M.Div. degree over a period of several years as a late–vocations student. Deacon John, who fell asleep in the Lord last year, also served as a member of the Board of Trustees and the president of the St. Vladimir’s Seminary Foundation.

What follows are four separate audio feeds, including Q&A follow up, from the Poverty Conference. Ancient Faith is broadcasting these as part of its regular podcasts by the Very Rev. Dr. Chad Hatfield, Chancellor of St. Vladimir’s. But first listen to Fr. Chad’s May 24 broadcast, in which he addresses negative reaction to Acton’s participation in the conference by some associated with the seminary. He reminds listeners that Acton, on the issue of poverty, can provide a fresh and different approach that’s effective.

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From Ancient Faith: (more…)