Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Public Policy

September 22, 2014

The ‘War on Poverty’ and the Unique, Unrepeatable Poor Person

Last week the U.S. Census Bureau released its report, Income and Poverty in the United States: 2013. The agency announced that “in 2013, the poverty rate declined from the previous year for the first time since 2006, while there was no statistically significant change in either the number of people living in poverty or real median household income.” Continue Reading...
September 17, 2014

Lecrae, Ferguson, and the Limits of Respectability

With Lecrae’s Anomaly album claiming number the one spot on Billboard’s Top 200, the rapper has come under fire for his recent comments about the inconsistency of those who rightly protest police abuse yet do not protest forms of rap music that glorify violence in general. Continue Reading...
September 11, 2014

How Common Core Will Increase Poverty

In his Epidemics, Hippocrates, the father of western medicine, wrote that the physician has two special objects in view: to do good or to do no harm. That same principle should be the special object of every educator. Continue Reading...
September 10, 2014

Net Neutrality? Yes. Title II? No.

I have spoken in the past in favor of net neutrality, writing, Whoever is responsible for and best at enforcing it, net neutrality had this going for it: it was a relatively stable, relatively open playing-field for competition…. Continue Reading...
September 08, 2014

The Crisis of Sexual Abuse in Juvenile Detention Centers

“Inmates are still people, and therefore need to be treated as such, with all the challenges and potential that face all human persons,” says Acton research fellow Jordan Ballor. “One of the things it means to treat someone with the dignity they deserve as a human being is to not subject them to conditions where the threat of rape is rampant.” Continue Reading...
September 05, 2014

Are You an Athlete or a Spectator?

Today at Ethika Politika, I caution against the sort of scapegoating that justifies ideologies at the expense of human effort: Do you support capitalism? Socialism? Distributism? Something else? Wonderful. What does that look like among the mess of market forms that actually constitute the economy you participate in every day? Continue Reading...
September 04, 2014

Notes on the Question of Inequality

This summer’s issue of The City, which includes an article by myself on Orthodoxy and ordered liberty, opens with a symposium of five articles on “The Question of Inequality.” These include two articles on Pope Francis, two on French economist Thomas Piketty’s recent book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and one on the Bible. Continue Reading...
September 03, 2014

Orthodoxy and Economic Liberty

In the most recent issue of The City, I have an essay on Orthodoxy and ordered liberty. I argue that Orthodox theological anthropology, which distinguishes between the image and likeness of God and two forms of freedom corresponding to them, fits well with the classical understanding of ordered liberty. Continue Reading...
August 29, 2014

Happy Money

In his August 24, 2014 syndicated column Scott Burns tells of a study by Dunn and Norton who give five principles for having “Happy Money.” Buy experiences not things: go to Chicago rather than buy a new stuff. Continue Reading...