On Fridays, we bring you the best of our blog and the best of the web. This week’s roundup includes tips for millennials who want to buy a home, posts on the relationship between faith, family and economics, and more.
1. Losing My Religion: Faith, Family, and the Real Story of Secularization in the West: At Public Discourse, Julia Shaw writes on Mary Eberstadt’s book “How the West Really Lost God.”
The future of the faith-family double helix is unclear. Eberstadt recognizes that predicting the future is risky, so instead she presents both a case for pessimism—fewer people are getting married and staying married; fewer people are bearing children, let alone bearing them in wedlock; and a case for optimism—as society becomes more fragmented, the need for the family increases, so decline can lead to resurgence.2. The moral complexities of the minimum wage: Jordan Ballor of the Acton Institute has a great piece at Think Christian on the realities of minimum wage laws, joblessness and more.
A series of protests by fast-food workers over the last few weeks were designed to bring the issue of the minimum wage into greater focus. The moral warrant for such measures seems obvious: people are having trouble making ends meet at their current wage. The just thing to do seems to be to require employers like McDonald’s to pay their workers more. But while such advocacy has brought greater visibility to the challenges faced by many workers, there are some unseen and unappreciated complexities involved with minimum-wage mandates.3. Infiltrated: How to stop the insiders and activists who are exploiting the financial crisis to control our lives and our fortunes: Yesterday at AEI, Jay Richards of the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics and the Discovery Institute, discussed his new book “Infiltrated,” along with AEI’s Tim Carney, Cato’s Mark Calabria and Wayne Abernathy of the American Bankers Association. 4. Tips for millennials who want a mortgage: AEI’s Emily Rapp provides some housing finance tips—”from one millennial to another.”
Millennials – those born in the 1980s or 1990s – have been raised with lofty American dreams of going to college and owning their own home. However, such dreams are expensive and have already placed millennials in debt. According to The Project on Student Debt, the average amount of student loan debt for the Class of 2011 was $26,600. As our generation moves out into the workforce, already burdened with student debt, how can we successfully take on mortgages?5. Why ‘The Family’ Matters in Economics: Michael Hendrix writes on Nick Schulz’s “Home Economics” book at the Mere Orthodoxy blog.
The decline of the American family is the most pressing challenge of the 21st century. As Nick Schulz has so rightly shown in his new book, our economy needs strong families—and our society depends on them. We should stop ignoring this reality.
