Latest Posts

March 19, 2008

Tempering predictions of progress

I was reading about Bill Gates’ speech to the Northern Virginia Technology Council last week, which received a lot of media coverage (PDF transcript here). In the speech about software innovation, Gates “speculated that some of the most important advances will come in the ways people interact with computers: speech-recognition technology, tablets that will recognize handwriting and touch-screen surfaces that will integrate a wide variety of information.” Continue Reading...
March 19, 2008

The ABCs on AIDS in Africa

Edward C. Green and Allison Herling Ruark of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies cut through the nonsense and offer clear thinking on AIDS in Africa. Their article in the April issue of First Things more specifically criticizes a recent report on faith-based organizations and AIDS emerging from the Berkley Center at Georgetown University. Continue Reading...
March 18, 2008

Bashing globalization in the name of European ‘values’

Hostility towards globalization is not the exclusive territory of the left in Italy. Giulio Tremonti, a former minister of the economy in Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right government, has written a book called Fear and Hope (La Paura e la Speranza), largely arguing against free trade and the opening of international markets. Continue Reading...
March 18, 2008

An open letter to Southern Baptists

Dr. Frank S. Page President, Southern Baptist Convention and Mr. Richard Land SBC Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and Pastor Jonathan Merritt Cross Pointe Church Brothers in Christ: As a member in good standing of the Southern Baptist Church and a Christian who has through much prayer and Bible study come to acknowledge God’s desire that the church take seriously her role in stewardship of creation, I have been closely following the release of A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change and the Southern Baptist Convention’s reaction to it. Continue Reading...
March 17, 2008

Can any good come from a recession?

Following its new-found interest in sound economics, the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, has turned its attention to what now seems to be a global downturn. The usual European trope is that the current troubles are the result of American overspending, overconsumption and unsustainable debt burdens, so it is very surprising to see a contrarian view in Sunday’s paper entitled “The Morality of the Recession.” Continue Reading...
March 15, 2008

‘Hot air gods’

The title of Curtis White’s provocative but flawed essay in Harpers… As an intro to his primary topic (politics), White has some provocative things to say about the contemporary (American) understanding of our “beliefs”… The most bewildering and yet revealing gesture of a truly fundamental American theology takes place when an individual stands forth and proclaims, “This is my belief”. Continue Reading...
March 15, 2008

‘What the Democrats can learn from a dead libertarian lawyer’

The subtitle of Damon Root’s article in Reason— food for thought for Dems (and GOP’ers) and a history lesson on an important but obscure figure, Moorfield Storey… With Republicans apparently uninterested in pleasing the libertarian segments of their coalition, some liberals and libertarians—Daily Kos blogger Markos Moulitsas, former Democratic National Committee press secretary Terry Michael, and Reason contributor Matt Welch among them—have suggested an alternative: the libertarian Democrat, the sort of liberal who favors both free speech and free trade, both the right to bare pornography and the right to bear arms. Continue Reading...