The Social Conservative Review: December 13, 2013

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Dear Friend,

It's common this time of year to ask, "Are you ready for Christmas?"

Usually what's meant by this is, have you purchased all the presents you wish to give? Are your travel plans all set? Will you be taking time off between Christmas and New Year?

Shorthand expressions save time and unneeded explanation, but sometimes they misstate the very question they ask.

In a recent talk at FRC, Dr. Kenyn Cureton got to the real meaning of how to be ready for Christmas and invited us to consider how to truly prepare for "the Word (Who) became flesh." Dr. Cureton, who leads FRC's Church Ministries department, invested 20 years as a pastor after earning his Ph.D. in theology. His message is informed by a scholar's eye and a pastor's heart, and most supremely by love for Jesus Christ. You can listen here.

Get ready - and Merry Christmas!

Rob Schwarzwalder
Senior Vice President
Family Research Council

P.S. Adult stem cell treatments save lives, and FRC's Dr. David Prentice offers proof in his fascinating recent talk here at FRC.

Educational Freedom and Reform
Homeschooling

• "Will SCOTUS Take Case of German Family Seeking Asylum in U.S.?," Fox News
• "Keene Board of Education lobbies to be reimbursed for cost of services to homeschooled students," The Sentinel

Legislation and Policy Proposals

• "Peonage for the Twenty-First Century," The Public Discourse
• "Sam Rocha's Strange and Startling Philosophy of Education," First Things
• "Schools Improve When Leaders Stop Rationalizing Mediocrity," Education Next
• "How bad are the Common Core lessons on the Gettysburg Address?," Thomas B. Fordham Institute
• "U.S. Achievement Stalls as Other Nations Make Gains," Education Week

College Debt

• "Jobs Gap Between College, High School Graduates Widens," The Wall Street Journal
• "Average student loan debt: $29,400," CNN

Government Reform
Regulation

• "Regulation Nation: Gov't regs estimated to pound private sector with $1.8T in costs," Fox News
• "3 Examples of Government Regulation Gone Horribly Awry," PolicyMic
• "Why Do We Have Excess Regulation, and Can We Get Rid of It?," National Review Online

Waste/Fraud/Abuse

• "The $38 billion nuclear waste fiasco," Politico
• "The Nanny State's Bad Medicine," Commentary Magazine

Health Care
Abstinence

• "Why Abstinence Works...Even When it Doesn't," Independent Journal
• "Sex and College Students: When 'just say no' doesn't work," Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission

Health care reform: ACA/Obamacare

• "Sex, Lies, and ObamaCare," The American Thinker
• "Do we want more affordable health care? Then we need to leave health care to the free market," The Center for Vision and Values
• "New Obamacare Headache: Is Your Enrollment Real?," ABC News
• "Obamacare Enrollments May Not Be Real," Washington Free Beacon
  "Obamacare Website Is in Great Shape -- If This Were 1996," Wired
• "Death of a talking point: Obamacare and the coming 'doctor shortage crisis'," AEIdeas.org
• "The Damage of Regulation in the Healthcare Industry: Nothing New," Values and Capitalism
• "If you like your freedom, you can keep it?," The Washington Examiner
• "Creating a 'Good Samaritan' Network of Charity Clinics," The Galen Institute

Homosexuality

• "GoldieBlox: This season's gender-neutral toy craze," AEIdeas.org
• "Judge Rules Baker Must Provide Wedding Services to Gay Couples Despite Religious Convictions," The Blaze
• "Report says benefits for same-sex partners expanding in wake of Supreme Court marriage ruling," Minneapolis Star-Tribune
• "Self-Harm and Suicidal Thoughts Higher Among Transgender People in the UK than in Ireland," Turtle Bay and Beyond
• "Gay youths 148% more likely to be physically abused in relationships: DOJ-funded report," LifeSiteNews

Human Life and Bioethics
Abortion

• "Obama's corporatist contraceptive mandate," The Washington Examiner
• "Dazed and confused: Misunderstanding the pro-life message," Live Action News
• "Abortion Foes Would Let Women Sue Clinics Over Regulation," Bloomberg
• "Few abortions covered with insurance in Michigan as lawmakers consider restrictions," Associated Press
• "Abortion Advocates Intimidate Witnesses and Cover Up Contraception Scandal," C-FAM
• ""Amnesty International" is now "Abortion International"," Turtle Bay and Beyond
• "I Lost My Daughter to the Culture of Death," Intercollegiate Review
• "U.S. abortions on the decline, CDC says," WORLD Magazine
• "Roe v. Wade at 40," Claremont Review of Books

Bioethics and Biotechnology

• "Where Do (Modern) Babies Come From?," The Public Discourse
• "Bioethicist Wants to Prevent Elderly People From Living Too Long," LifeNews.com
• "God Intervened in HIV cure of baby, Hannah Gay believes," Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission

Euthanasia and End of Life Issues

• "Euthanasia education for kids in Belgium," LifeSiteNews
• "17-Year-Old Takes Euthanasia to Task: Kill the Pain Not the Patient," LifeNews.com

Stem Cell Research
To read about the latest advances in ethical adult stem cell research, keep up with leading-edge reports from FRC's Dr. David Prentice, click here.

• "Embryonic stem cell research falls out of favor as scientists go ethical," The Washington Times
• "Follow $ to Non-Embryonic Stem Cell Research!," National Review Online
• "Tiny oil droplets help measure mechanical forces produced by living cells that shape tissues and organs," Phys.org
• "Miracle of Science: 65 Diseases Treated With Adult Stem Cells," Christianity Today

Human Trafficking

• "How text messages help the Polaris Project zero in on human trafficking," The Washington Post
• "Looming Super Bowl drives efforts to toughen Az sex trafficking laws," The Tucson Sentinel
• "UN Calls for Investigation into Alleged Thai Human Trafficking," Voice of America
• "As Former Prostitute Speaks Out, Lawmakers Target Human Trafficking," Time

Marriage and Family
Adoption

• "The views of a man raised by a lesbian couple on gay adoption," The Iona Institute
• "Adoption agency advertises children in local newspapers," The Telegraph
• "Two Foster Girls' Adoption Christmas Wish Granted After Prayer Balloon Found," The Christian Post
• "From one adoptee to another," WORLD Magazine
• "Biblical Adoption Is Not What You Think It Is," Christianity Today

Family Economics

• "Moving Money From One Place To Another Is Not Economic Stimulus," The Acton Institute
• "The Free Market is Answer to World Poverty, Says Theologian," The Christian Post
• "Why Do You Work?," Ligonier Ministries
• "Explaining income inequality by household demographics," AEIdeas.org
• "Servile Work and the Kingdom of God," Values and Capitalism
• "Fighting Poverty With Actual Evidence," Freakonomics
• "Some Questions for Minimum-Wage Proponents," Café Hayek
• "Invisible Child," New York Times
• "What President Obama Missed in His Inequality Speech," Family Studies

Family Structure

• "The Reforming Power of Children," The Acton Institute
• "Motherhood and Career: A Thrilling Tug of War," The Public Discourse
• "The Beauty of Motherhood, Captured," Patheos.com
• "What's Love Got to Do With It?," Alliance Defending Freedom
• "The economic benefits of childbearing," MercatorNet
• "Can Youth Ministers Actually Work with Parents?," The Gospel Coalition
• "Adultery Prevention," The Christian Pundit
• "One theory of marriage," The Atlantic

Media
Pornography

• "What Can Pornography Teach Us About Love?," Intercollegiate Review
• "Violent Porn Leads to Violent Crime," PornHarms.com
• "Porn addiction leads teen to heinous murder," WORLD Magazine
• "Why Does He Look at Pornography?," Biblical Counseling Coalition
• "Resistance to Porn from an Unlikely Place," Crisis Magazine

Religion and Public Policy
Religious Liberty

• "What Is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act?," The Volokh Conspiracy
• "War on Contraception? No, an Attack on Religion," The Acton Institute
• "American Jurisprudence Has Made A Mess Of Religious Freedom," The Federalist
• "Religious Liberty and ObamaCare," The Wall Street Journal
• "Contraceptive cases raise religious liberty issues," Politico
• "Discrimination Against Christians?," First Things
• "ObamaCare, Religious Liberty, and a Crucial Supreme Court Showdown," Commentary Magazine
• "Should Compelling You to Violate Your Deeply Held Religious Beliefs Really Be "The Price of Citizenship"?," Alliance Defending Freedom
• "Our Failed Religious Freedom Policy," First Things

Religion in America
Check out Dr. Kenyn Cureton's feature on Watchmen Pastors called "The Lost Episodes," featuring how religion has had an impact on our Founding Fathers.

• "Separation of Church and Church," The Weekly Standard
• "Do We Need To 'Check Our Faith At The Door?'," The Acton Institute
• "Evangelical Retreat?," First Things
• "Does sports fandom help or hurt our walk with Jesus?," Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission
• "Grace & Truce," Touchstone Magazine
• "10 Things Evangelicals Can Be Thankful for This Year," Juicy Ecumenism

Secularism

• "Québec's Secular Charter," The Public Discourse
• "Blame Secularists for Culture of Death?," National Review Online
• "The Mysteries of Atheism," The Imaginative Conservative

International
Israel

• "Former U.N. Ambassador Yoram Ettinger: 'The deal with Iran and P5+1 Subordinates Reality to Wishful Thinking'," Family Research Council
• "The politics of subversion," CarolineGlick.com
• "When Friends Turn Anti-Semitic," Commentary Magazine

International Economy and Family

• "Croatians Vote to Protect Marriage in Constitution," Family Research Council
• "Why Greece Will Leave the Euro," The American
• "The Croatian Government's Dirty War Against Marriage," Turtle Bay and Beyond
• "Public Sees U.S. Power Declining as Support for Global Engagement Slips," Pew Research Center for the People and the Press

Religious Persecution

• "The Global War on Christians," Crisis Magazine
• "The Arrest and Torture of the Most Hated Man in Egypt," Touchstone Magazine
• "When We Send a Person To His Death," Desiring God

The Courts
Constitutional Issues

• "Obama Uses IRS to Eliminate His Enemies," Breitbart.com
• "Thanksgiving and the Constitution," The Public Discourse
• "BREAKING NEWS: Cases Dismissed and Pro-Lifers' First Amendment Rights Protected," Thomas More Society
• "If Obamacare Is Overturned, Case Western Law Prof. Jonathan Adler gets the Credit," The FedSoc Blog

Other Issues

• "Tyranny in American Political Discourse," The Imaginative Conservative
• "Historical Parochialism: American Slavery is Not Ancient Slavery," Philosophical Fragment
• "Video Games & Virtual Evil," The Fixed Point
• "On Football, Warrior Culture, and Manhood," The Gospel Coalition
• "The Philanthropic Spectacle," City Journal

Book reviews

• "Donna Tartt's Goldfinch," First Things
• "From Heaven He Came and Sought Her (Yarbrough)," The Gospel Coalition
• "The Secret Life of Walter White," Claremont Review of Books
• "The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh," The Imaginative Conservative
• "The Daniel Plan," Challies.com