In the World

The Catholics and the Southern Baptists have joined others in calling for a compassionate response to the unaccompanied minors from Central America. Russell Moore of the SBC has even signed a letter (pdf) explicitly opposing changes to the 2008 law that currently prevents such children from being summarily deported. Most Americans agree, including majorities of both Republicans and white evangelicals. Yet Congress went on recess without doing anything about this.

Reading David Brooks sometimes makes me want to tear my newspaper to shreds, throw the shreds in the fireplace, and douse them in something that burns even faster. Of course, my fireplace is decorative and my newspaper’s actually a laptop, so I control myself. Brooks would approve. He likes self-control.

Remember in the fall, when Obamacare's insurance exchanges got off to a shamefully bad start, and people who never liked the health-care law in the first place started cheering its impending doom? Yeah, they were wrong.

How do American people-of-faith feel about American people-of-different-faith? The Pew Forum has a new polling report on this question. It seems Catholics have a slightly higher view of Jews than vice versa, while white evangelicals' view of Jews is much higher than Jews' view of evangelicals. White mainline Protestants have moderately positive views of Jews, Catholic, and evangelicals, while the opposite is.... Huh, okay.

I found this June NYT article a bit disturbing: some funeral home directors have been placing dead people in lifelike, meticulously personalized poses for their own funerals. It's easy enough to see this as just a continuation of the standard individualistic funeral treatment, honoring people's hobbies and interests.

Taking in refugees, giving asylum—these are things that generous people from a better place do for helpless people from a worse place. But we aren’t actually better.

Several weeks ago, Chipotle founder Steve Ells published a column headlined "Conventional vs. Grass-fed Beef." As you've probably heard, Chipotle prefers the latter—the fast-casual burrito chain has a lot to say about agricultural reform, ethical food, etc. But here the subject is more complicated than the title suggests: Ells was defending Chipotle's decision to stop buying exclusively domestic beef in favor of importing some of it from Australia, where the grass-fed supply is better. It's a classic food-ethics connundrum: should you go with the higher production standard, or the food produced closer to home? Chipotle chose the former, a perfectly defensible choice if you just have the two.

Yesterday I posted about the Hobby Lobby decision, observing that it can’t be both a broad precedent that will protect liberals’ freedom of conscience along with conservatives’ and a narrow ruling that isn’t really a big deal. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was clarifying that whatever the ruling ultimately means, it definitely isn’t quite as narrow as to apply to just the allegedly abortifacient contraceptives Hobby Lobby’s owners object to.

Is Burwell v. Hobby Lobby about freedom of (corporate) conscience broadly, or is it just about a few specific contraceptives? It can’t really be both.

Survey question from Pew: "Poor people have hard lives because government benefits don't go far enough to help them live decently, or poor people have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything?" Almost four out of five conservatives: Oh the poor, totally have it easy.