Many Evangelicals often put an emphasis on the Great Commission, but sometimes make a great omission. This is only one of three mandates we have. The first one God gave us is the creation mandate, Genesis 1 – 3: we are to be creative and create good things, for ourselves and others, being good stewards of all things entrusted to us ”“ even in the physical arena. This of course includes being creative in business ”“ to create wealth. Wealth creation is a godly talent:“Remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth.”(Deut 8:18) As Christians we often focus more on wealth distribution, but there is no wealth to distribute unless it has been created.

The second mandate is the great commandment which includes loving your neighbor. In the first and second mandates you find a basis for what modern day economists call CSR ”“ Corporate Social Responsibility. It is about creating wealth and producing products and services in ways which consider ”˜your neighbor’.

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President Obama’s 2013 budget would add $3.5 trillion to annual deficits through 2022, according to a new estimate from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

It also would raise the deficit next year by $365 billion, according to the nonpartisan office.

The CBO estimate is in sharp contrast to White House claims last month that the Obama budget would reduce deficits by $3.2 trillion over the next decade.Ӭ

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What has taken the place of religious commitment is the “economy” in the form of an ever greater consumption of the goods that science in the service of technology and industry delivers. Combined with an ever more malleable and mercurial “self” defined in terms of the fulfillment of material desires, the urge for infinite acquisition has become the default religion even of believers. This “religion” prevails even though in acting it out Christians violate their own religion’s claims that self-love and covetousness are close to the essence of sin. The religion is that of Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes,” or, more recently, “Whatever.”

Yet this state of affairs cannot last because neither science nor philosophy can prove the existence of individual rights, the maintenance of which is the liberal state’s only reason for existence. The ecological limits of indefinite production and consumption moreover threaten to topple the very foundations upon which this default religion rests.

This scenario in a few words characterizes the symptoms of liberal Western “civilization” and its discontents as sketched by Brad Gregory in The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Or rather liberal Western civilization and its “contentments.”

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As many as 20 million Americans could lose their employer-provided coverage because of President Obama’s healthcare reform law, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said in a new report Thursday.

The figure represents the worst-case scenario, CBO says, and the law could just as well increase the number of people with employer-based coverage by 3 million in 2019.

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For a five-doctor practice, the Advisory Board Co., a health-care research firm, projects the total first-year cost at between $126,000 and $346,500, including two added nurses.

The upshot: Doctors fear a squeeze as they try to ramp up changes in tandem with evolving reimbursement schemes. “You’re asking a practice that may be only marginally viable as a business to invest in significant infrastructure,” says Glen Stream, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. “Is the payment model going to be there to support that?”
Some doctors aren’t waiting to find out. Instead, they’re going to work for hospitals, which have greater financial resources and, because of their leverage with insurers, are also often paid more than small practices for the same services. The consulting firm Accenture projects that, by 2013, only around a third of doctors in all specialties will own their own practices, down from about 43% in 2009 and nearly half in 2005.

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[CHRIS] ARNOLD: In other words, without the rest of the economy doing better, will the recovery in the jobs market stall out?

Lawrence Katz says that idea is troubling, because even the job growth that we’re seeing right now isn’t great and we need it to get much stronger.

[LAWRENCE] KATZ: Even if we had a very rapid recovery, we have a huge distance to go still. We are still 10 million jobs behind. So it would take basically four years of strong job growth to get back to a normally functioning labor market.

ARNOLD: So slower job growth would mean an even longer period of high unemployment and economic hardship for millions of Americans.

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The CBO forecasts it will now cost $1.76 trillion over a decade, whereas before they forecast it would cost 940 billion.

Read it carefully and follow all the links. Also, you can read more over there.

Software developers are salivating over prospects for the new iPad, which sold out online within two days of its unveiling and won’t ship now for up to three weeks.

Apple had originally set the ship date for March 16. The new iPad goes on sale in stores on a first-come, first-served basis on Friday.

Still the folks behind the $5 billion plus business of games and apps that sell in Apple’s App Store are working overtime to either overhaul their apps or create ones that take advantage of the new iPad’s improved graphics and performance.

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As Nicholas Eberstadt and Apoorva Shah of the American Enterprise Institute point out, over the past three decades, the Arab world has undergone a little noticed demographic implosion. Arab adults are having many fewer kids.

The speed of the change is breathtaking. A woman in Oman today has 5.6 fewer babies than a woman in Oman 30 years ago. Morocco, Syria and Saudi Arabia have seen fertility-rate declines of nearly 60 percent, and in Iran it’s more than 70 percent. These are among the fastest declines in recorded history.

The Iranian regime is aware of how the rapidly aging population and the lack of young people entering the work force could lead to long-term decline. But there’s not much they have been able to do about it. Maybe Iranians are pessimistic about the future. Maybe Iranian parents just want smaller families….

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The US, Japan and the European Union have filed a case against China at the World Trade Organization, challenging its restrictions on rare earth exports.

US President Barack Obama accused China of breaking agreed trade rules as he announced the case at the White House.

Beijing has set quotas for exports of rare earths, which are critical to the manufacture of high-tech products from hybrid cars to flat-screen TVs.

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It is crisis time in Trenton, where the city is literally running out of toilet paper.

“It’s about one of the last boxes of toilet paper we have for the city buildings,” said maintenance supervisor Paul Heater, pointing to a large box.

Supplies have dwindled down to almost nothing because City Council has failed to approve the mayor’s $42,000 order for paper products.

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After reading the entire story ”” roughly 1,000 words ”” I have two main reactions. The first is a general journalistic reaction. The second relates more specifically to the actual religion content (that’s our purpose at GetReligion, after all).

”” Reaction No. 1: The piece lacks perspective….

”” Reaction No. 2: The piece lacks theological content.

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The likelihood of 20-somethings moving to another state has dropped well over 40 percent since the 1980s, according to calculations based on Census Bureau data. The stuck-at-home mentality hits college-educated Americans as well as those without high school degrees. According to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of young adults living at home nearly doubled between 1980 and 2008, before the Great Recession hit. Even bicycle sales are lower now than they were in 2000. Today’s generation is literally going nowhere. This is the Occupy movement we should really be worried about….

In the most startling behavioral change among young people since James Dean and Marlon Brando started mumbling, an increasing number of teenagers are not even bothering to get their driver’s licenses. Back in the early 1980s, 80 percent of 18-year-olds proudly strutted out of the D.M.V. with newly minted licenses, according to a study by researchers at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute. By 2008 ”” even before the Great Recession ”” that number had dropped to 65 percent….

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The job outlook is brightening for younger workers, who were hit hard in the recession and play a vital role in the economy.

Jobs for 25-to-34-year-olds increased by 116,000 to 30.5 million in February. Their unemployment rate fell from 9% in January to 8.7%, the lowest since January 2009, according to the Labor Department.

Just as important, the portion of Americans in that age bracket who were employed ”” known as the employment-to-population ratio ”” rose to 74.7% from 74.5% and is up from a 29-year low of 73.2% in July. In a normal economy, about 80% of 25-to-34-year-olds have jobs.

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America is back. You can tell because Americans are maxing out their credit cards again.

Household debt grew at an annualized rate of 0.25% in the last quarter of 2011, according to the Federal Reserve’s flow-of-funds report released last week. That’s not a big jump, but until now there hadn’t been any uptick at all in household debt since the 2008 crash.

“Consumers have been more willing to use credit cards for shopping, signaling renewed confidence in their financial and job prospects,” explained Paul Edelstein, director of financial economics at IHS Global Insight, in a recentAssociated Press report.

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Christians do not have a right openly to wear a crucifix at work, the government is to tell the European Court of Human Rights.

Ministers are set to argue at the Strasbourg court that employers should be able to dismiss workers who insist on wearing a cross….

Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, said the government’s position was another sign that Christianity was becoming sidelined.

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It was not a good week for New York’s cities and counties.

On Monday, Rockland County sent a delegation to Albany to ask for the authority to close its widening budget deficit by issuing bonds backed by a sales tax increase.

On Tuesday, Suffolk County, one of the largest counties outside New York City, projected a $530 million deficit over a three-year period and declared a financial emergency. Its Long Island neighbor, Nassau County, is already so troubled that a state oversight board seized control of its finances last year.

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The Vatican on Friday sought to explain its presence for the first time on a U.S. list of countries that are a potential hub for money laundering, saying it was only natural to be included given its recent efforts to conform to international standards.

The U.S. State Department this week released its International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, which identified the Holy See as one of 68 countries or jurisdictions “of concern” for money laundering or other financial crimes….

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Ray Ozzie, the man who succeeded Bill Gates as Microsoft’s tech visionary, believes the world has moved past the personal computer, potentially leaving behind the world’s largest software company.

The PC, which was Microsoft’s foundation and still determines the company’s financial performance, has been nudged aside by powerful phones and tablets running Apple and Google software, the former Microsoft executive said.

“People argue about ‘are we in a post-PC world?’. Why are we arguing? Of course we are in a post-PC world,” Ozzie said at a technology conference run by tech blog GeekWire in Seattle on Wednesday.

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The agency says it has strengthened the electronic system used to screen returns for potentially fraudulent refund claims by thieves who often use other people’s Social Security numbers or other identifying information. When the computer detects reason to suspect fraud, it refers a tax return for investigation, holding up the refund for weeks.

This and other computer glitches have slowed refunds and led to widespread unhappiness, particularly among low- and moderate-income people, who often receive significant cash refunds thanks to a range of tax credits and often rely on that money to pay bills.

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Poverty has not been front and center in American political debate since the passage of the welfare reform act in 1996.

But a new book may have started to change that.
Conservative scholar Charles Murray, who created intense partisan conflict with “The Bell Curve,” his 1994 book on inheritance and intelligence, has now touched a nerve with “Coming Apart: the State of White America, 1960-2010.”

In it, he argues that there is a growing gap between highly educated, married, hardworking, affluent Americans and unmarried, less educated, chronically unemployed poorer Americans.

With one run of the printing presses, he has reignited the culture wars.

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A New Jersey church – already a bit different in that its three congregations gather weekly at two hotels and a middle school – put a new spin on the collection plate Sunday by having congregants take cash-filled envelopes from the plate in hopes that the money will be put to charitable use.

“People are cynical about religion and expect to come to church and be shaken down, but really, it’s all God’s money,” Liquid Church pastor Tim Lucas said prior to Sunday services. “Every bill in the U.S. economy says ‘In God we trust,’ and we’re going to put that to the test.”

Read it all. Please note that I know churches here both in the Diocese and in the area who have done this; and they have been blessed–KSH.

Less optimistically than Marx, the democratic left today mostly thinks of money as a necessary evil. This nasty material has to be used to make markets function and it has to be accumulated. But it should be reined back as far as possible: the state should confiscate the maximum amount of numbers that it can and place them safely under the control of predictable verbal orders and regulations.

But could it be that in its implicit advocacy of words over numbers the left has all too readily embraced a capitalist notion of the nature of money? This notion assumes that money is necessarily a commodity – whether valid or illusory, as it was for Marx – and that the pursuit of wealth consists in piling the stuff up as high as possible….

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The agency’s 2011 long-term budget outlook showed that federal debt would begin to hurt the economy once it reaches about 77% of GDP. CBO’s January budget and economic outlook estimated that it will hit that level in 2013 under its high-debt scenario that is based largely on current policy.

“CBO expects that the large government deficits during the recession and afterward will raise the cost of capital in the future . . . constraining investment,” the nonpartisan scorekeeper wrote in its January budget and economic outlook.

Initially, the impact would be minimal, but it would grow over time as debt levels increase.

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For the settlers, the presence of the Christian workers has more practical applications.

“Today we have more than 200 acres. It’s a lot of agriculture and it takes a lot of work,” says Veret Ben Sadon, who helps run the Tura Winery. “We saw that we cannot work alone. I can say for sure that without this help, we cannot do what we are doing today.”

Essentially she gets free labor for the heavy seasonal work that needs to be done. She says there is a labor shortage in the area and the Christians fill the gap.

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[The] Greece youth unemployment rate has risen to 51.1%. It was 39% in 2010, 28.9% in 2009, 26.3% in 2008, 24.5% in 2007

–Alberto Nardelli as cited in this morning’s Telegraph.

The social-bookmarking site Pinterest has been around since 2010, but if you’re on Facebook you have probably noticed an upswing in people “pinning” things ”“ that is, posting found images under their names, in folders like “Clothes I’d Like to Own” or “Places I’d Like to Visit.” If you are a woman you are much more likely to have heard of it, as women so far have been its primary users. But business magazines are calling it the fastest-growing site ever: It now has 12 million unique visitors. With so much momentum, it is unlikely that women will hang on to it as their little secret for much longer.

Pinterest’s enthusiastic proponents say that there is nothing new about making collages of pictures that express our personalities: Most of us did it with cut-up magazines as children. But I think there is also something entirely contemporary about the kind of collecting that seems to dominate this site….

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Mitt Romney won the delegates, but not necessarily the argument.

His quest to win the Republican presidential nomination has always resembled a detailed, methodical business plan. Mr. Romney, who spent much of his life fixing troubled corporations, must now decide whether steps are necessary to repair his lethargic candidacy.

Mr. Romney had hoped that a string of Super Tuesday victories in contests from Vermont to Alaska would effectively bring the Republican race to a close.

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Pinched by the global recession and tough-love budget demands of the European Union, the Italian government is looking for extra revenue, and has its eyes set on commercial properties owned by the Roman Catholic Church.
On Feb. 15, the government of Prime Minister Mario Monti announced it wants to revise rules on the tax-exempt status of church-owned commercial property. Although the exemption also applies to other not-for-profit entities, such as trade unions, political parties and religious groups, the Catholic church is its largest beneficiary.

“Such a move would have been unimaginable six months ago,” said Francesco Perfetti, a history professor at LUISS University in Rome. “After all, no matter whether you are a believer or not, the church is an integral part of Italy’s culture.”

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“What started as targeted sanctions to push back the nuclear program has in reality turned into comprehensive, broad sanctions that have hurt the Iranian people,” said Ali Vaez, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Iran Project in Washington.

If Western governments are counting on economic deprivation to bring radical change in Iran, analysts say they are likely to be disappointed.

“History shows that sanctions do not yield regime change — this is particularly true for states that emerged out of revolutions,” said Middle East analyst Arshin Adib-Moghaddam of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

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