Americans are losing their vision. Literally. Researchers are learning that the real reason for the dramatic surge in myopia is that we are becoming a nation of dedicated indoorsmen.
Science
Environmental Stewardship and Virtue
Having ignored environmental issues for so long, we may wish we could simply look up some Bible texts, or trust our hearts, to determine what to do--how to steward the earth well. We can't. We wind up aping the ideologies and practices of the left and the right, without much to contribute ourselves, being either uncritically accepting or unreasonably dismissive of claims of environmental crisis. The way to learn a virtuous approach to creation care, is to begin with small, repeated, steps of faithfulness, knowing that we will make mistakes, but concerned more to develop a virtuous character than to "follow rules" or "follow our hearts".
Climate scientists, skeptics earn a “great big time out”
By now you're bound to have heard of the great "Climategate" scandal of late 2009. Hackers broke into the computer archives of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and stole data and email archives dating back 10 years. Then, somehow (who can say?) these files found their way into the hands of climate uber-skeptics. It was discovered that--shock, horror--climate scientists were saying rude and very unscientific things about their most relentless critics.
Overpopulation: The environmental problem that isn’t
The "problem of overpopulation" is taking care of itself. Public policy should focus more directly on the things that make people better off. Coercive population control is immoral, and other efforts at "regulating population" are less effective than helping families lead productive, rewarding, and flourishing lives.
Should You Worry about Mercury in Swine Flu Vaccine?
Hint: if you wear a seat belt but also believe that thimerosal preservatives in vaccines cause autism, you may be inconsistent. Pregnant women and small children, and others at risk, should get the vaccine when it is available.
Gas Taxes with justice
But the fact is, we probably weren’t paying enough for gasoline even at its highest levels, because we weren’t paying the full costs of producing and using it...We would like pollution taxes to work through the substitution effect and not through the income effect. We don’t want our policies to leave households, and especially poor households, holding the bag while we solve pollution problems.
Stuck in the Middle on Climate
Those on the left sometimes seem to claim unanimity among climate scientists as to the culpability of people for global warming. Those on the right seem to imply there is major controversy about whether people are to blame. Neither view is correct.
“Dominion” means dominion
Journalist G.K. Chesterton once quipped (in Orthodoxy), that original sin was "the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved." Approaching theology, as Karl Barth famously suggested, with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, certainly finds the hypothesis of total depravity unfalsified. Yet by the end of the … Continue reading “Dominion” means dominion
Tilling and Keeping 