Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Public Policy

March 21, 2012

An Indian Perspective on Business as Mission

As I mentioned in my previous post, the Business as Mission (BAM) model has become a global phenomenon. As more Christians embrace BAM it is not only changing the lives of individual Christians but is helping to change, as Daniel Devadatta explains, the culture of business in India: Continue Reading...
March 21, 2012

The Mission of Business

Over the past decade the model of Business as Mission (BAM) has grown into a globally influential movement. As Christianity Today wrote in 2007, the phenomenon has many labels: “kingdom business,” “kingdom companies,” “for-profit missions,” “marketplace missions,” and “Great Commission companies,” to name a few. Continue Reading...
March 15, 2012

Why Churches Don’t Pay Taxes

As society becomes more secularized, the calls for churches to pay their “fair share” become more vocal. Erik Stanley, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, explains why churches should remain exempt from paying taxes: Why is your church tax exempt? Continue Reading...
March 13, 2012

How to Steal a Bike in New York City

Edmund Burke didn’t really say it, but it still rings true: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. In a test of this maxim, filmmaker Casey Neistat tries to steal his own bike in several locations around New York City and finds that most people do nothing about it—even when it’s done right in front of a police station. Continue Reading...
March 09, 2012

Malthus and the Contraceptive Mandate

“The power of population,” wrote the Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus in 1798, “is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” In other words, unless population growth is checked by moral restraint (refraining from having babies) or disaster (disease, famine, war) widespread poverty and degradation inevitably result. Continue Reading...
March 07, 2012

The Temptations of Poverty

Galatians 2:10 reads, “All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I had been eager to do all along.” This is the conclusion to the Jerusalem Council, in which Paul and the leaders in Jerusalem are reconciled and unified, and where is decided that Paul and Barnabas “should go to the Gentiles, and they [James, Peter, and John] to the circumcised” (v. Continue Reading...