Ethics and Public Policy Center

EPPC: Culture’s Power to Reduce Poverty

August 26, 2011 9:40 AM

Here's the Progressive matrix: Foster dependency under the rubric of compassion, then point with alarm to the results of the policies in order to make the dependencies permanent. In the meantime, treat the dependents as a market and build industries around the pathologies that developed that are lucrative to Progressive industry -- abortion, lobbying, and so forth. Resist all efforts to improve education and moral renewal in the impoverished areas, and the result is constituency that keeps the profits and political influence in place from one generation to the next. From the essay: My former White House colleague Ron Haskins points out that "Census data show that if all Americans finished high school, worked full time at whatever job they then qualified for with their education, and married at the same rate as Americans had married in 1970, the poverty rate would be cut by around 70 percent." The best way to keep open the pathway to the American Dream, then, is through a "success … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Observer Tagged With: Culture, Ethics and Public Policy Center, poverty

Russian Orthodox Leader Stands for Principle

February 20, 2011 11:09 PM

Here we see it unfolding. Orthodox Christianity has much to give the world, and it begins with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and a vigorous defense of biblical teaching through the wisdom and experience of our Orthodox tradition. And the teachings must be clear on the foundational issues that determine whether a culture and people lives or dies: the sanctity of life, marriage and family, sexuality, and the moral principles people have held to for centuries. This must be the message of Orthodox leaders. There is no other. Source: American Thinker The "great man" theory of history — that strong, unique, and highly influential individuals shape history (for good or ill) through their commanding personal characteristics that imbue them with power and influence over a specific period of time or during certain circumstances — may not be as widely accepted today among professional historians as in the past, but for many of us there is no denying what our own … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Observer Tagged With: American Thinker, Culture, Ethics and Public Policy Center, Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, Institute on Religion and Democracy, Met. Hilarion, Orthodox Church, religious freedom, World Congress of Families

Papal Environmentalism: Pro-Life and Pro-Marriage

February 20, 2010 3:04 PM

Ethics and Public Policy Center | George Weigel In his January 11 address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, Pope Benedict XVI continued to carve out an interesting Catholic position on ecology. The Pope insists that care for creation is a moral obligation that falls on both individuals and governments. His very invocation of "creation," however, challenges the secular shibboleths that underwrite a lot of contemporary environmental activism. Here is the money paragraph in the papal address to the diplomats assembled in the Sala Regia of the Apostolic Palace: "Twenty years ago, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the materialistic and atheistic regimes which had for several decades dominated a part of this continent, it was easy to assess the great harm which an economic system lacking any reference to the truth about man had done not only to the dignity and freedom of individuals and peoples, but to nature itself, by polluting soil, water, and air. … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Observer Tagged With: Culture, Environment, environmentalism, Ethics and Public Policy Center, George Weigel, Marriage, Politics, Pope Benedict XVI, religious freedom, same-sex marriage, sanctity of life