According to a recent Pew Research study, the U.S. level of government restrictions on religion (3.7 on a 10-point scale) is 54 percent higher than the world median (2.4) in 2012, the latest year for which data are available.
Sherry Shannon needed a little extra money to get her car fixed. On Social Security disability, Shannon needed every dollar to pay her rent, utilities, and phone bills — leaving room for little else each month.
As America secularizes, a false understanding of freedom is becoming increasingly pervasive in public life. Two current issues being considered by the Legislature — payday lending reforms and the legalization of a commercial surrogacy business — provide an opportunity to examine the social ramifications of this newfound “freedom.”
“Say NO to the Commercial Surrogacy Bill, SF 2627/HF 291. The bill has many implications for women and children. It is irresponsible for the Minnesota Legislature to not fully examine the significant concerns surrogacy raises.”
Without any significant consideration, the Minnesota Legislature is poised to create a commercial surrogacy business that would essentially legitimize the buying and selling of children between two contracting parties.
This session, state legislators are considering raising the minimum wage to $9.50 for large businesses (those businesses with over $500,000 in annual gross revenue), which was a recommendation of the 2010 bi-partisan Legislative Commission to End Poverty.
Recently, Pope Francis has denounced usury as contrary to human dignity and a “dramatic social ill” because it takes advantage of another person in desperate financial situations.
In the 1930s, during a time of economic depression and geopolitical upheaval and uncertainty, Catholic Worker movement co-founder Peter Maurin wrote a collection of “Easy Essays” to help people understand and live Catholic teaching in the social and political sphere.
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church states that “participation in community life is not only one of the greatest aspirations of the citizen, called to exercise freely and responsibly his civic role with and for others, but is also one of the pillars of all democratic orders and one of the major guarantees of the permanence of democratic life.”
The story of America is the story of immigration. That is the message of Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez’s important and timely book entitled, “Immigration and the Next America” (Our Sunday Visitor). In it, Archbishop Gomez argues that the immigration debate is about much more than immigration.
The Church and the minimum wage