Joe Carter

If a terrorist wants to launch an attack in the U.S. using a weapon of mass destruction they have two basic options: (1) Create the WMD in a foreign land and smuggle it into America, or (2) smuggle a knife onto an American airplane and use it to create a WMD. The first option remains only a hypothetical scenario, yet the threat of it occurring was used as a primary justification for the invasion of Iraq… . Continue Reading »

The latest sign of the times from Britain: More than half of younger people have never heard of the King James Bible, a survey shows. Fifty-one per cent of under-35s did not know what the Authorised Version was, compared with 28 per cent of over-55s. The Authorised King James Version, which will be . . . . Continue Reading »

Tim Challies provides a remarkable statistic and a sobering reflection: Seven hundred billion minutes. That’s how much time Facebook’s 500 million active users spend on the site every month. 700,000,000,000 minutes. Let that one sink in for a moment. Every month we spend the equivalent of . . . . Continue Reading »

In theory, raising taxes should be a way to increase revenues that can be used to reduce the federal deficit. In reality, increased tax revenues not only do not reduce the deficit, they lead to increased spending : In the late 1980s, one of us, Richard Vedder, and Lowell Gallaway of Ohio University . . . . Continue Reading »

Over on the Evangel blog, Jeremy Pierce explains the moral reasoning behind Pope Benedict’s recent comment on the use of condoms: There’s a category of moral obligations that occur in funny circumstances. Given that you are doing a certain immoral thing, there are nevertheless . . . . Continue Reading »

1. A Brief History of Economic Time One hundred years ago the average American workweek was over 60 hours; today it’s under 35. One hundred years ago 6% of manufacturing workers took vacations; today it’s over 90%. One hundred years ago the average housekeeper spent 12 hours a day on . . . . Continue Reading »

Like me, you’ve probably recently asked yourself, “If FirstThings.com were a country, how populated would it be?” Fortunately, the good people at Sharenator have a tool that shows the size of media empires. According to them, if Firstthings.com were a country, it would be larger . . . . Continue Reading »

A growing number of Americans believe that marriage is becoming an obsolete institution : Marriage is increasingly optional and could be on its way to obsolescence,according to a survey of more than 2,600 Americans that examines changing attitudes about relationships today. Among the 2,691 adults . . . . Continue Reading »

[Note: Every Friday on First Thoughts we host a discussion about some aspect of popular culture. For the next few weeks, we’ll be highlighting lists of the best of 2010.] With an estimated 200 million active blogs written in the English language, choosing the best blogs of the year is a . . . . Continue Reading »

Does Facebook tempt couples into committing adultery? One pastor seems to think so : Facebook and adultery seem to go hand in hand, according to the Rev. Cedric Miller of Neptune, N.J. So, on Sunday, Miller is going to ask his congregation at Living Word Christian Fellowship to delete their . . . . Continue Reading »