General Sites

• Allowing Competition Between Mainstream and New Religions by Winston Frost
  
  "We must reclaim society through peaceful, intelligent, and honest thought. We must win the war of ideas in our homes, our schools, and our civil centers. We must present a clarion call to the citizenry of the dangers inherent in a naked public square. To do any less will be to pass up the opportunity represented to each and every one of us to be apologists for not only Christ, but for an America based on a Christian worldview."
  
  
• The American Assembly Report: Matters of Faith: Religion in American Public Life
  
  "This Assembly sought to identify as wide a circle as possible of shared values among the many religions in the United States in order to help create an atmosphere of mutual respect in public life in which their religious differences could be discussed in a less divisive way and in which those shared values could help resolve non-religious issues, and thus lead towards a more united America."
  
  
• The Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life
  
  Associated with Boston College, the goal of the Boisi Center is to create opportunities where a community of scholars, policy makers, media and religious leaders in the Boston area and nationally can connect in conversations and scholarly reflection around issues at the intersection of religion and American public life.
  
  
• The Center for Public Justice
  
  An independent civic education and policy research organization that bases its research, publications, training, and advocacy upon a comprehensive Christian political foundation.
  
  
• Christianity.ca's Social Issues Page
  
  Links to articles and other resources on the social issues that involve Christianity or morality in Canada.
  
  
• The Church in the Public Square in a Pluralistic Society: A Response to David L. Adams by Pastor Don Matzat
  
  "The issue for secularists in the public square is not focused upon the content of Christianity but the concept of a "God" to whom one is responsible. Believing in a God cramps the style of hedonists who want to do their own thing; frustrates the humanists who arrogantly think that they are the measure of all things; challenges the evolutionists who reject the existence of any mind behind the universe; irritates the self-esteem advocates who view God as a guilt-monger; exasperates the positivists who chaff at the notion that morality is not merely their own good idea; and angers the atheists who vow to rid the public square of any acknowledgment of a God. Theologians who seemingly join forces with these anti-God groups by denigrating civil religion puts them in bed with some rather strange fellows."
  
  
• eCLAL (The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership) Online Journal of Religion, Public Life and Culture
  
  CLAL’s activities are dedicated to building a Jewish life that is spiritually vibrant and engaged with the intellectual and ethical challenges of the wider world.
  
  
• First Things: The Journal of Religion and Public Life
  
  FIRST THINGS is published by The Institute on Religion and Public Life, an interreligious, nonpartisan research and education institute whose purpose is to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society.
  
  
• The Gopher's Den
  
  An ongoing blog from the McLaurin Institute featuring discussions of Christ in culture and religion in the public square.
  
  
• The Heritage Foundation
  
  The Heritage Foundation is a research and educational institute - a think tank - whose mission is to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.
  
  
• Markkula Center for Applied Ethics articles on Biotechnology and Healthcare Ethics
  
  The title says it all.
  
  
• Moteworthy.com
  
  A blog authored by Francis Beckwith, Reid McKee, Jack Nowlin, Micah Watson, Latrell, and Walter Neff with whimsical thoughts and links to articles on issues relating to Christianity and public discourse.
  
  
• ProfessorBainbridge.com
  
  An eclectic mix of law, business and economics, politics and current events, Catholicism, and wine put into a blog run by Professor Stephen Bainbridge, Corporate Law Professor at UCLA.
  
  
• Religion as Public Good: Jews and Others in the Public Square by Michael Gottsegen
  
  A pdf file of a speech given at the Boise Center for Religion and American Life seminar on Judaism and Civic Participation in American Life. -- "American civil religion calls Americans to a higher way of life and opposes the twin idolatries to which America would otherwise be susceptible: the idolatry of self and the idolatry of nation. And to return to our original framing of the issue, we can surely agree that any religion that served these ends would surely serve the public good and, indeed, it would itself be a public good."
  
  
• To the Source
  
  A search engine that searches various magazines that involve the interplay of society and religion, including American Values.org, the Council for Biotechnology Policy, Crisis, the Economist, the New Criterion and others.
  
  
• Witherspoon on the Web's Faith and Politics Page
  
  "But that requires us to ask about the relationship between religious beliefs and political convictions. In part this question concerns motivations within the same person or group. But it becomes a public issue when we ask how convictions that are impelled by religious beliefs can be made convincing to those who may be outside the faith community."
  

Marriage and Sexual Orientation

• Church Moral Debate
  
  "Our purpose is to help inform the church’s moral debate concerning homosexuality by supplying research findings that counter widely held assumptions regarding homosexuality and by providing theological documents that reflect the authority of scripture."
  
  
• Clothing the Naked Public Square: Ideal Marriage and the Creation of a Polity of Love Articles From the May 1995 Unification News
  
  "So, marriage and family are enormously important, and yet they have contained a tragic flaw. That tragic flaw is the root of self-centered love within each husband and each wife, i.e., the problem of the body. That shred of distrust, that flitting fancy for another partner, that subtle accusation of the other as being responsible for one's own unsatiated hunger for love. That not-quite-harmony of mind and body. That not-quite-connection of man and woman. That emptiness at the center."
  
  
• A Defining Moment: Marriage, the Courts, and the Constitution by Matthew Spalding, Ph.D. for the Heritage Foundation
  
  "In general, fundamental social changes in long-standing traditions and institutions should be seriously considered only where there is strong consensus for change, as well as clear evidence and powerful reasons for the modification. Change for the sake of social experimentation and perceived "cultural progress" is inherently dangerous and jeopardizes the ordered liberty that is necessary for a free society."
  
  
• Homosexual Marriage: Is it Time for Change from the American College of Pediatricians
  
  "Violence among homosexual partners is two to three times more common than among married heterosexual couples. Homosexual partnerships are significantly more prone to dissolution than heterosexual marriages with the average homosexual relationship lasting only two to three years. Homosexual men and women are reported to be inordinately promiscuous involving serial sex partners, even within what are loosely-termed "committed relationships." Individuals who practice a homosexual lifestyle are more likely than heterosexuals to experience mental illness, substance abuse, suicidal tendencies, and shortened life spans."
  
  
• Journey Together Faithfully: A Call to Study and Dialogue from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
  
  "The 2001 Churchwide Assembly has mandated that this church engage in a study on homosexuality and a study on sexuality. The first is to deal with the blessing of same-gender unions and the rostering of persons in committed gay or lesbian relationships. The second is to lead to the development of a social statement on sexuality."
  
  
• Marriage Is Not God’s Answer to Loneliness by Christopher Ash
  
  "God makes it clear that His remedy for human loneliness is fellowship, not (necessarily) marriage. Fellowship with the Father and the Son, and with our brothers and sisters in Christ, this is God’s remedy for loneliness. It is a remedy gloriously open to all, including all those for whom marriage is not a possibility—those too young for marriage, the widowed, the divorced, those struggling with homosexual temptation, those who cannot find a marriage partner."
  
  
• Redefining Marriage Away by Robert P. George and David L. Tubbs
  
  "In a 1999 survey of such couples in Massachusetts, sociologist Gretchen Stiers found that only 10 percent of the men and 32 percent of the women thought that a "committed" intimate relationship entailed sexual exclusivity. An essay called "Queer Liberalism?" in the June 2000 American Political Science Review reviewed six books that discussed same-sex marriage. None of the six authors affirmed sexual exclusivity as a precondition of same-sex marriage, and most rejected the idea that sexual fidelity should be expected of "married" homosexual partners."
  
  
• Same Sex Marriage is Not a Civil Right by James W. Skillen
  
  "[T]his debate is about whether the law that now defines marriage is itself good or bad, right or wrong. And to join that debate one must appeal, by moral argument, to grounds that transcend the law as it now exists. In that regard, the question of marriage is not about a civil right at all. It is about the nature of reality and interpretations of reality that precede the law."
  
  
• Same Sex Unions are Not Marriages by Gwendolyn Landolt
  
  "However emotionally bonded a same-sex couple may feel, their relationship is not, and cannot, ever be a marriage. This is because their relationship is completely different from that of an opposite-sex married couple. It is completely false, therefore, to suggest that the relationships are equal—they are not."
  
  
• Sex and Marriage: Does the public have a right to regulate these matters? by Michael J. O'Connor
  
  "From all that we have said so far we can see that private matters concerning sex and marriage are not to be seen as absolutely isolated from the public interest. In fact such privacy is a crucial positive element that contributes to the welfare of society. Conversely, there are some actions associated with sex and marriage that, no matter how private, by their very nature affect other people and, if not done in a responsible manner, end up being wrong."
  
  
• The Supreme Court and the Assault on Marriage by Donald DeMarco
  
  "Depositing sperm in the 'wrong place' (like pouring motor oil into the gas line), by nature’s standards, is courting disaster. Nature, we might add, demands respect. It does not make accommodations to politically based ideologies or individual preferences. From nature’s standpoint, there is no equality between heterosexual and male homosexual intercourse."
  
  
• We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident by Joel Marks
  
  "If love alone is the criterion of marriage, then what is to prevent the legalization of polygamous marriages, or even of incestuous marriages? (But clearly that would be wrong; ergo ...) Therefore there must be additional constraints on marriage. Where can we discover these? Yes, religion is a source, but only as a special case of the more general idea that tradition is a good guide. And the latter has its authority because it is an indicator of natural law, which is the moral law that governs society, analogous to the ‘scientific’ laws that govern the physical universe."
  

Abortion

• Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation by Frm. President Ronald W. Reagan from National Review Online
  
  While president, Ronald Reagan penned this article for The Human Life Review, unsolicited. It ran in the Review's Spring 1983, issue and is reprinted here with permission. Make no mistake, abortion-on-demand is not a right granted by the Constitution. No serious scholar, including one disposed to agree with the Court's result, has argued that the framers of the Constitution intended to create such a right."
  
  
• Consent, Sex and the Prenatal Rapist by Francis J. Beckwith and Steven D. Thomas
  
  McDonagh takes a drastically one-dimensional view of pregnancy, exploiting its hardships to the point of implicitly advocating compulsory abortion. Her reliance upon consent may also, under certain circumstances, require carrying a pregnancy to termÑwhat some prochoice advocates would term Òcompulsory pregnancy.Ó In so doing, McDonagh has provided for us a medium by which to discover the possible or prima facie good inherent in pregnancy, a good that cannot be reduced to mere consent.
  
  
• Culture of Life Foundation and Institute
  
  The mission of the Culture of Life Foundation is to provide the leadership and financial resources to promote a universal commitment to protect and nurture all human life from conception until natural death. The mission of the Culture of Life Institute is to analyze, interpret and communicate both existing and new scientific data and factual research on issues concerning human life and the family.
  
  
• Evangelizing Abortion Survivors by Rev. Frank Pavone
  
  "Abortion survivors, to put it simply, live on shaky ground. “If my mother could have aborted me, what is my life worth?” These individuals live with a sense of worthlessness and a feeling of impending doom. They suffer existential anxiety and survivor guilt."
  
  
• Liberty, Logic and Abortion by Mark Goldblatt
  
  "What I'm about to argue is that the debate over abortion now continues on three distinct but inter-related levels. The first level, which might charitably be called Popular Arguments, consists of absolutist slogans and unexamined logic; it's this level of argumentation that often crops up at unpleasant dinner parties and on phone-in talk shows. The second level consists of nuanced speculations on natural law and individual rights; it's conducted by moral philosophers beneath the radar of the mass media. The third level consists of evolving theories of constitutional interpretation; it's conducted in the courts by legal scholars."
  
  
• Long-Term Physical and Psychological Health Consequences of Induced Abortion: A Review of the Evidence.
  
  A 31-page pdf file on the currently known medical and health risks relating to abortion. "Despite strong recommendations for substantive research, and the clear need for women to have accurate information as they execute their autonomy, current data remain sparse, studies are small and methodologically flawed, and the conclusions are often intertwined with the political agendas of their authors and publishers."
  
  
• Roe v. Wade: It's Logic and it's Legacy(.pdf file) by Francis J. Beckwith
  
  
• Scans uncover secrets of the womb.
  
  "Professor Campbell has perfected a technique which not only produces detailed 3D images, but records foetal movement in real time. He says his work has been able to show for the first time that the unborn baby engages in complex behaviour from an early stage of its development."
  
  
• Stand to Reason's Bio-Ethics Center: Articles by Scott Klusendorf and Steve Wagner.
  
  A series of articles on abortion and debate tactics on abortion from one of the best Christian apologetics resources around. An outstanding collection of articles.
  

Stem Cell Research

• Campaigning for Stem Cells: Research Advocates Launch a New Offensive for Funding
  
  "Embryonic stem cell research is promising but so far purely speculative; the federal government in no way limits such research in the private sector; supporters of the research believe they can obtain hundreds of millions of dollars ($100 million at Harvard alone) in private funding in the next few years; and yet, despite the ethical objections of a very substantial portion of the public, they insist that Congress should compel every American to support the research with tax dollars, and to make that happen they inflate the promise and distort the facts surrounding the research. Perhaps there is some truth after all to recent talk about the politicization of science."
  
  
• The Ethics of Human Closing and Stem Cell Research Produced by the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and others.
  
  "'California Cloning: A Dialogue on State Regulation' was convened October 12, 2001, by the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Its purpose was to bring together experts from the fields of science, religion, ethics, and law to discuss how the state of California should proceed in regulating human cloning and stem cell research."
  
  
• Do No Harm -- The Coalition of Americans for Research Ethics
  
  Part of the Coalition's objectives are: "(1) To advance the development of medical treatments and therapies that do not require the destruction of human life, including the human embryo, and (2) To educate and inform public policy makers and the general public regarding these ethically acceptable and medically promising areas of research and treatment."
  
  
• The Ethics of Stem Cells: Eric Cohen versus Arlen Specter
  
  "This research may work and it may not -- we cannot know in advance. There are powerful reasons to do it, as the faces of the suffering remind us daily. But there are also clear ethical reasons not to use the "seeds of the next generation" as tools to aid our own: because it will coarsen our ethical sensibilities; because it will make us users of life in the very effort to be savers of life; and because, as theologian Paul Ramsey once put it, 'the moral history of mankind is more important than its medical history.' Most often, medicine and morality advance together -- but not always."
  
  
• Inflated Promise, Distorted Facts
  
  "Embryonic-stem-cell research is promising but so far purely speculative; the federal government in no way limits such research in the private sector; supporters of the research believe they can obtain hundreds of millions of dollars in private funding in the next few years, as the creation of new stem-cell institutes at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Wisconsin demonstrates; and yet, despite the ethical objections of a very substantial portion of the public, stem-cell advocates insist that Congress should compel every American to support the research with tax dollars, and to make that happen they inflate the promise and distort the facts surrounding the research."
  
  
• Meet Dr. Kerry and his cure for Alzheimer's by Paul Greenberg
  
  "No reputable scientist I've ever heard of (as opposed to Dr. Kerry) is claiming that experimenting with human embryos is going to cure Alzheimer's. That's because Alzheimer's seems to be a deterioration of the brain in general rather than some localized, cellular disorder that would benefit by an injection of stem cells."
  
  
• The Science, Politics, and Ethics of Stem Cell Research from Newsbriefings by the U.S. News Library
  
  A page from U.S. News and World Report containing Documents & Reports, Key Players, Government Action, Statements & Hearings, Public Opinion, History, Related Web Sites, News Coverage, and a Library Bookshelf related to this issue.
  
  
• Stem cell polling clashes over research that destroys embryos
  
  "Americans strongly favor non-embryonic stem cell research over experimentation that destroys human embryos, according to two new polls. A survey performed by The Harris Poll, however, showed widespread support for destructive stem cell research. Another recent poll reported a majority of Americans believe it is more important to conduct such research than to protect human embryos."
  
  
• Stem Cell Research and Applications: Monitoring the Frontiers of Biomedical Research
  
  "The potential of a stem cell to become a human being seems to be much more like that of a somatic cell that could be cloned than like an embryo. The natural development of the individual cells of the embryonic disk (from which stem cells are derived) is to become parts of a human being. Isolated from the total structure of the embryo or blastocyst, these cells, even under favorable growth conditions, will not develop the trophoblast (the outer layer of cells of the embryo) or other structures needed for continued development."
  
  
• Stem-Cell Research: How Catholic Ethics Guide Us
  
  "The stem-cell debate might be an opportunity for us to ask if we should not, as a nation, begin to focus on prevention rather than cure as our dominant health-care strategy."
  

Church and State

• J.M. Dawson Institute for Church State Studies at Baylor University
  
  Baylor University established the J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies in 1957. The Institute is the oldest and most well established facility of its kind located in a university setting. It is exclusively devoted to research in the broad field of church and state and the advancement of religious liberty around the world. Includes links to church-state sites.
  
  
• Thomas More Law Center
  
  The Thomas More Law Center is a not-for-profit public interest law firm dedicated to the defense and promotion of the religious freedom of Christians, time-honored family values, and the sanctity of human life. Its purpose is to be the sword and shield for people of faith, providing legal representation without charge to defend and protect Christians and their religious beliefs in the public square.
  

Euthenasia

• International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide -- Euthanasia in the Netherlands
  
  Right-to-die advocates often point to Holland as the model for how well physician-assisted, voluntary euthanasia for terminally-ill, competent patients can work without abuse. But the facts indicate otherwise. This fact sheet is based upon developments in the Netherlands through 1994. It includes data from the "Remmelink Report."
  

Christianity in the Schools

• School Choice Links from The Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life
  
  As education reform and school choice have become central topics in American political life, there has been a massive proliferation of web-based resources on the subject. This collection of links seeks to provide some consolidation of these various resources while maintaining representation from across the spectrum of opinion.
  

Christianity in the Workplace

Prominent Christian Spokespersons

• C.S. Lewis: 20th Century Knight
  
  A page of links devoted to the late, great Christian apologist to the public square: C.S. Lewis. Includes links to articles and essays about his life and thoughts.
  
  
• The C.S. Lewis Society
  
  The C.S. Lewis Society of California is an independent, non-profit, educational and cultural organization whose mission involves increasing public understanding of the philosophical, religious, cultural, historical, literary, social, and economic topics C. S. Lewis addressed and which relate to this work and the enduring issues facing all of mankind .
  
  
• Philosophical Themes from C.S. Lewis
  
  "The basic idea behind this site that the work of C.S. Lewis is a rich source of philosophical ideas and arguments, many of which deserve exploration from contemporary philosophers. In fact, this was also the idea behind my recently doctoral studies completed in 2003, of which a summary and extracts are available on-site."
  
  
• The Shelter's Links to Articles about Francis Schaeffer
  
  Perhaps no other Christian thinker of the twentieth century, aside from C.S. Lewis, has had as significant an impact on the lives of others as Francis Schaeffer. His books and lectures were discussed by students, pastors, hippies, scientists, philosophers and artists. He claimed that there were "no little people" and challenged everyone to think and live all of life as an artistic expression that the infinite-personal God is there and is not silent.
  
  
• G.K. Chesterson's Works on the Web
  
  Chesterton was unique in making the paradoxical case for both the safeguards of tradition and for progressive reform. In politics, Chesterton crusaded for free and independent families while attacking the central planners of both collectivism and big business. He was as ardent in attacking socialism as he was in denouncing monopolistic capitalism. He joyfully warred against both atheists and wrong-headed believers. He was as tough on pacifists as he was on militarists, and as hard on Puritans as he was on the new pagans. All the files are available in plain ASCII text format, and many are also available in HTML. The larger files are also available as zip archive files.
  

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