It is a fact that certain ideas die hard, suffering a long senescence before passing forever into “the ash heap of history.” And no set of ideas seems to be suffering a longer decline than the idea that “Christianity is the religion of which socialism is the practice.”
The real danger of the Bush administration's faith-based initiative lies not in some fictitious breach in “the wall between church and state” but in the use of taxpayer dollars to fund secular environmental ideology dressed up in “faith-based” clothing.
A little more than a week ago, 12 Kenyan religious leaders representing six denominations met with an American Catholic priest, an American Reformed minister, an Australian intellectual, and a Washington, D.C.-based policy analyst in Putten, Netherlands, to discuss the political and economic realities currently facing the nation of Kenya.
In the divinely ordained institution of the family, parents are given responsibility for the upbringing of children. The experience of the Washington Scholarship Fund (WSF) is a case study in the exercise of this parental responsibility (and the opposition it sometimes evokes).
Childcare funding has increased a whopping 409 percent from $2.2 billion in 1992 to $11 billion 2002. Two-thirds of this spending, however, did not come from new congressional appropriations, but from the dividend derived from welfare reform.
Often absent from many of the policy debates in Washington is a reference to the first principles that animate, or should animate, the discussions surrounding important issues. Will the attitude of government subsidy or the restoration of communal subsidiarity ultimately form the foundation of this debate?
When I had a heart attack, the staff of the hospital – hospitals are real energy guzzlers – used yards of plastic tubing, wire, oxygen and costly electronics to save my life.
In fine Washington style, the announcement of President Bush’s economic growth plan has sparked another round of inside the beltway class warfare. Typically, the anti-growth crowd has issued the now stale cry that this plan “benefits the wealthy”, while leaving little for low- and middle-income Americans. Such a clarion call greatly misunderstands economic reality.
To confuse this political agenda with authentic ethics is not only an intellectual error. For students, it breeds a kind of cynicism that one’s moral obligations concerning business can be discharged by adhering, or pretending to adhere to, a certain brand of left-leaning politics.