Luther … establishes a sharp opposition between what the Christian does as a private person and Christian and what he does and has to do in fulfilling the responsibility of his office in behalf of those who have been entrusted to his care. As a Christian, when his own personal wefare is involved, he seeks…

President Bush is in even greater danger of losing the crucial Philly vote than before (link via Matthew Yglesias): It all started yesterday, when CNN, Fox and The New York Times were content to transcribe and transmit President Bush’s comment about preferring his Philadelphia cheesesteaks “Whiz with,” thereby handing the Bush camp what it was…

Since many Christians seem eager to align Christian belief with laissez-faire capitalism, it might be instructive to consider what one of the great teachers of the church had to say on the subject of private property. I realize that St. Thomas carries more authority with Catholics than sola scriptura Protestants, but at the very least,…

Colby Cosh: For three years and change, the man who pledged a “more humble [American] foreign policy” has been raked over the coals for failing to adhere to that promise, despite the unusually strong reasons (e.g., the large ashen hole in the lower part of Manhattan) for a midterm course change. Now Bush has taken…

From Slate’s Timothy Noah: Not long ago, I spoke with a Democratic moderate about the war in Iraq. He said he considered support for the Iraq war to be a necessary prerequisite to assuming any powerful role in the party. It showed that the person in question was willing to project United States force abroad.…

Via Telford Work I came across a link to something called “Worldview Weekend,” a site that promises to teach you to “live and think like a Christian.” The site even offers a “Worldview Quiz” that enables you to determine how “biblical” your worldview is. Well, much to my dismay, not only did I not score…

It is only the novice in political economy who thinks it the duty of government to make its citizens happy. Government has no such office. To protect the weak and the minority from the impositions of the strong and the majority–to prevent any one from positively working to render the people unhappy, to do the…

From Godspy: I’ve never been so close in my life to not voting in the presidential election at all—surely a cop-out and a sin for a conscientious citizen of any persuasion, religious or political. So, beyond sending a few bucks to Democrats for Life, I’m back to participating, it would appear, in that other quadrennial…

If conservatives and libertarians disagree about ends, but agree (sometimes) about means, the reverse might be said of libertarians and liberals. To see why, consider that libertarians often trace their intellectual lineage to J.S. Mill’s “On Liberty.” For Mill, our proper ends are not given by religion or traditional morality. Rather, the proper end of…

Touchstone Magazine has recently put up an extensive archive of its articles going back to 1999. One of the gems I came across is a piece by Christopher Killheffer: “Our Food from God.” Killheffer writes: The industrial system of raising animals is not disordered because it kills chickens; it is disordered because it first, from…