Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Public Policy

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 14, 2008

Homeschooling under fire in California

In this week’s Acton commentary, Chris Banescu looks at a ruling by the Second District Court of Appeals for the state of California which declared that “parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children.” Continue Reading...
March 13, 2008

Not so fast…

The big boys at the Southern Baptist Convention are running from Jon Merritt’s statement on ecology and climate change faster than a pack of polyester-clad deacons trying to beat the Assembly of God folks to Denny’s for Sunday brunch. Continue Reading...
March 07, 2008

Who said it?

Surely these are the words of a disciple of Hayek or Friedman, right? Under the guise of protecting us from ourselves, the right and the left are becoming ever more aggressive in regulating behavior… …The real question for policy makers is how to protect those worthy borrowers who are struggling, without throwing out a system that works fine for the majority of its users (all of whom have freely chosen to use it). Continue Reading...
March 07, 2008

Educational freedom under attack

As many PowerBlog readers will be aware, homeschooling is an educational choice that increasing numbers of parents are making. Once a fringe activity operating under the radar of the law, over the course of the last thirty years it has practically gone mainstream, being legalized de jure in most states and de facto in the others. Continue Reading...
March 05, 2008

The call of workplace chaplaincy

Richard Baxter, the seventeenth-century Puritan identified by Max Weber as embodying the Protestant ethic of “worldly asceticism,” once called for chaplains to be sent into places of work for the conversion of sinners. Continue Reading...
March 04, 2008

Red China struggles to go green

OSD’s Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China has some illuminating – and somewhat staggering – insight on the current state of affairs with respect to China’s environment and how it influences their national strategic policies. Continue Reading...
March 04, 2008

Where do we go from here?

Matt Stone asks the question: What do you think are some of the challenges that remain for Christian environmental theology? I am presuming here that, if you’re the sort of Christian that likes a blog like mine, you’re not the sort of Christian who needs to have the dots joined between Christian ethics, creation care and environmental theology. Continue Reading...
March 03, 2008

Will socialized health care in the US kill Canadians?

Don Surber thinks so, and it’s hard to argue his point when you see stories like this: More than 400 Canadians in the full throes of a heart attack or other cardiac emergency have been sent to the United States because no hospital can provide the lifesaving care they require here. Continue Reading...