Month: February 2015

February 20, 2015

Religious Activists Push Back Against ‘Blunt Instrument’ of Fossil Fuels Divestment

Your faithful correspondent last week exposed the fossil-fuel divestment endgame of religious shareholder activists. As You Sow President Danielle Fugere sees her group’s activities as awareness-raising exercises for climate change, but AYS’s alignment with environmentalist and divestment firebrand Naomi Klein suggests they’d settle for nothing less than nationalizing oil companies. Continue Reading...
February 20, 2015

Does Innovation Triumph Over Regulation?

Do government regulations squelch marketplace innovation? A new study from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Nathan Goldschlag and George Mason University’s Alex Tabarrok says, “Not really.” According to Ryan Young at the Competitive Enterprise Institute: …the underlying institutions of social cooperation, market exchange, and dynamism are strong enough that federal regulation has, according to Goldschlag and Tabarrok’s analysis, so far been unable to squelch them. Continue Reading...
February 19, 2015

Radically Communitarian Islam

Graeme Wood’s excellent piece in The Atlantic has justly been making the rounds for the past week or so. It is well worth reading with a number of insights and points that strike at the heart of the contemporary conflict between modernity and religious violence. Continue Reading...
February 19, 2015

Marie Harf May Have Stumbled Into Something

I do not believe Marie Harf is an eloquent speaker, but I did think her “jobs for ISIS” remarks made some sense. We know that in American cities, for instance, if young men do not have education and jobs, they get into mischief. Continue Reading...
February 18, 2015

Does Manual Labor Have a Place in the Faith and Work Discussion?

Over the past two decades there has been an increased interest and promotion of the Biblical meaning of work and the Christian view of vocation. Many groups have contributed to this revival, including the Acton Institute (last year we launched Oikonomia, a blog at Patheos’ Faith and Work Channel, dedicated to providing resources specific to the intersection of faith, work, and economics). Continue Reading...