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When the cold war ended, we Americans found ourselves in an identity crisis. As James Wall noted recently (“Identity Crisis for Policymakers,” October 17) , having defined ourselves as militant anti-communists for so long, we don’t know how to conduct ourselves now that communism is no longer a threat. The invasion of Kuwait tempts us …
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Those rejecting the death penalty,” social critic Ernest van den Haag once remarked. “have the burden of showing that no crime deserves capital punishment—a burden which they have not so far been willing to hear.” This is a challenge to which opponents of capital punishment need to respond. In my experience, the most passionate calls …
Continue reading “Against the Death Penalty: Christian Stance in a Secular World”
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Major birth defects or congenital anomalies occur in approximately 8.3 per cent of all live births. One out of every 12 people one meets is likely to have a congenital anomaly. It might be something visible like a cleft palate, or something invisible like diabetes. Records of infant mortality have been kept since about 1850 …
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Public policy debates, complains Washington Monthly editor Charles Peters, tend to consist of a series of “automatic reactions” in which liberals and conservatives endlessly repeat their outworn positions instead of listening to each other. Mainline churches share in this tendency to repeat their favored positions and resist insights that are not their own. This approach …
Continue reading “Blinded by Metaphor: Churches and Welfare Reform”
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Most discussions of George W. Bush’s religious faith draw heavily on his campaign autobiography, A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House (1999), which puts religion at the beginning, middle and end of the story. Deliberately vague in its chronology, the book describes a man who drifted until middle age, when Billy Graham …
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Book Review: Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape Edited by Robert Orsi. Indiana University Press, 581 pp., paperback. The Gold Coast Church and the Ghetto: Christ and Culture in Mainline Protestantism. By James Wellman. University of Illinois Press, 304 pp., paperback. A Particular Place: Urban Restructuring and Religious Ecology in a …
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In the spring of 1976, I took my New Hampshire youth group to Philadelphia for the bicentennial celebrations. Not wanting to break the bank on hotels, we slept in a church hall in a suburb north of the city. There, for the first time in my life, I encountered row after row, block after block, …
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Grace at the Table, by David Beckmann and Art Simon. (Paulist, 220 pp. $10.95). Spencer Bachus, "a diehard Republican from Alabama’s most diehard Republican district," in the words of the Washington Post, has been spearheading an effort in the U.S. House of Representatives to offer debt relief to more than 40 impoverished nations. In Mozambique, …
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For most people throughout history the word “market” referred to a village event, often held weekly. It was more like our farmers’ markets or flea markets than like the stock market or what is today called simply “the market”. Indeed, it resembled these only in that it was a system of voluntary exchange. Adam Smith …
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The negative effects of free trade are readily apparent. No one doubts that free trade disrupts existing patterns of employment, creating hardship for those who lose their jobs. No one can realistically question that in the United States in recent years trade has taken away more well-paying positions than it has replaced at that pay …
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Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed. we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past. Willa Cather, My Ántonia Those who promote the preservation of historic buildings find houses of worship strategic. Such buildings often represent the most formal and ambitious efforts of those who …
Continue reading “Historic Church Preservation: Clues from the Almost Incommunicable Past”
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In 1992, the county board in Galena, Illinois, voted to allow the Silver Eagle, a riverboat casino, to cast anchor in the nearby Mississippi River. Tom Grey, pastor of the United Methodist church in town, was stunned. No one had asked the citizens of Jo Daviess County if they wanted gambling. No one had even …
Continue reading “Lonely Crusade: Fighting the Gambling Industry”
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A few years ago Alverta Handel, a housekeeper from Portage, was said to be the happiest person in Pennsylvania. She beat 9.6-million-to-one odds and won an $8.2 million share of the record-breaking $115 million lotto jackpot. The biggest winner was said to be the Pennsylvania state treasury, which netted $593 million from ticket sales. Lotteries …
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About ten years ago a neatly dressed man sat in on a session of the Medical Research Review Board of which I was a member. After the agenda items of the day were completed, our chairman requested permission for this man to pose a hypothetical question to us. These were the days, incidentally, before Institutional …
Continue reading “Medical Research: Establishing International Guidelines”
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Is there a place for morality — for any humane and universal morality — in the making of foreign policy? Lately many people seem to be thinking that consideration of this question began with President Carter’s declaration about human rights. That has a very high moral priority, but certainly there are many other fundamental issues …
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In government circles it’s called the "NIMBY problem." Whether the proposal is for AIDS clinics, halfway houses for prison parolees or dumps for toxic and nuclear waste, it is usually met by the opposition of citizens’ groups who shout NIMBY — "not in my backyard!" Yet these components of modern life must exist in somebody’s …
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Inequities in the distribution of what have come to be called "entitlements" need to receive more attention in American society. The disproportion of public funds paid to the elderly as over against payments and services to children is a scandal, but almost nobody is scandalized. A look at the facts and a little speculation concerning …
Continue reading “Politics and the Elderly: Toward a Sharing of Resources”
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Book Review: The Founders’ Constitution edited by Philip B. Kurkland and Ralph Lerner (University of Chicago Press), $300. 3,250 pp. The bicentennial celebration of the United States Constitution has naturally produced a flurry of books on the subject. Among the reissues of old standards and a largish crop of filio-pietistic potboilers are a number of …
Continue reading “Reasons and Arguments in the Constitution”
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America’s Roman Catholic bishops write that the "challenge of today is to move beyond abstract disputes about whether more or less government intervention is needed, to consideration of creative ways of enabling government and private groups to work together effectively’’ (Economic Justice for All) The truth of this declaration is evident in the U.S. housing …
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Several months ago a friend visited Nicaragua under the auspices of the “Witness for Peace” program. His first sermon upon returning challenged the congregation to write to the president and congressional representatives in protest of the U.S. effort to overthrow the Nicaraguan government and the U.S. support for the oppressive government in El Salvador. The …
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Western ideas about good cities descend from Athens, Jerusalem and Rome. From Athens we inherit two seminal ideas: that the good life is the life of moral and intellectual excellence, and that the good city is one that makes this good life possible for its citizens. From Jerusalem comes a third idea: that a city’s …
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Our health care system contains much of which we should be proud and much that we should conserve. It has enlisted the devotion of millions of professionals, created splendid hospitals, clinics and research institutions, and dazzled the world with its technical achievements. And it has allowed for some choice in doctors. Any reform of the …
Continue reading “The Ethical Foundations of Health Care Reform”
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Book Review: Falling from Grace: The Experience of Downward Mobility in the American Middle Class, by Katherine Newman. Free Press, 320 pp., $22.95. A debate has been raging over whether the U.S. is in the midst of military, economic and social decline — whether it is and will remain Number One. Yale historian Paul …
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A few years ago the United States refurbished and rededicated the Statue of Liberty, a powerful and oft-used icon of our generous and hospitable national spirit. However, in the light of the U.S. refugee policy over the past ten years, Lady Liberty may have taken on the function of a border guard. While the U.S. …
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Book Review: From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors By Lawrence J. Vale. Harvard University Press, 460 pp. American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto By Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh. Harvard University Press, 332 pp. Social policy is inscribed on the landscape. And perhaps the most telling such inscription …
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I. Ecclesiastical Globalization Christians have been interested in globalization from the earliest days of the faith. We inherited from Israel a story about the whole earth; so we have understood ourselves in the context of global history. We have understood that the good news about Jesus Christ was to be carried throughout the world. (Mt. …
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December 10, 1998 marked the 50th anniversary of the United Nation’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I believe that the continuing impact of this historic document is changing the world for the better; even though doubters can point to considerable contrary evidence. On the 44th anniversary of the Universal Declaration, for example, …
Continue reading “The Universal Declaration at 50: Changing the World?”
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I. World Government At Last? Do you favor world government? If so, you should look closely at the World Trade Organization. It is the only institution that has the power to overturn the laws of governments all over the world. It is the closest thing we now have to a world government. As a nation …
Continue reading “The World Trade Organization: A Theological Critique”
