Circuit Writer

“God’s Politics: a blog by Jim Wallace and friends” is a ministry of Sojourners, publishers of Sojourners magazine and other resources for the Christian walk.

Congress is hard at work on historic energy and climate change legislation. The House of Representatives plans to vote on a bill in the next few weeks, with the Senate to follow in early fall.

The bill is full of worthwhile provisions: investment in green jobs, modernizing our energy systems, and new pollution regulations. It also contains some less than desirable pieces like plans to give away the majority of pollution credits to industry in the initial years instead of auctioning them to create revenue for clean technology and assisting low-income consumers.

In my five years in Washington I’ve learned that supporting large pieces of legislation can be tricky. At Sojourners, we try to filter all of our policy work through the lens of caring for the most vulnerable, both in our country and around the world…

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Originally from the “Wired Science blog” at Wired.com – News For Your Neurons

Green jobs growth outpaced other-colored job classifications by nearly 250 percent over the last decade, growing 9.1 percent between 1998 and 2007, versus 3.7 percent for the overall job market.

There are now 770,000 green jobs spread out among 68,200 businesses, according to the new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts. While that’s a tiny slice of the overall American jobs pie, it is already approaching the same scale as the traditional energy sector — coal mining, utilities, big oil — which employs 1.27 million people. As a job creator, it stacks up even better against biotechnology, which (despite a longer history and greater investment) employs only 200,000 people…

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Originally from Week of Compassion, the relief and development fund of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in the United States and Canada.

Thursday, June 4, 2009 – Week of Compassion asks for your prayers and support as we attempt, through our trusted partner organizations, to accompany the scores of displaced and traumatized persons in Pakistan. This is a grave situation. Recent fighting between Pakistani military forces and Taliban insurgents in the northwest part of the country has uprooted more than 2.5 million people; heavy shelling, bombardment and continual cross-fire have compelled innocent people to flee their villages. It is expected that the number of uprooted persons could soon rise to three million. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has said that it may become the largest displacement since Rwanda and has already declared the exodus the biggest ever in the world during the past 15 years…

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My first blog entry at the Xenia Institute, this post explores the questions surrounding the questions of torture.  Are we allowing the debate over accountability obscure the fact that at the end of the day we’re still talking about torture?

The question of the use of torture in the U.S. carries both short- and long-term implications for the policies, relationships and even the cultural fabric of our country.  As of late, however, the issue seems to have become a hot potato that’s being tossed back and forth between competing political interests.  Instead of focusing on questions of relevance, such as “Does torture actually produce actionable intelligence?” or “Under what circumstances (if any) does torture carry ethical cache?”, the news has become littered with the question of who knew what, and when.  But is this the discourse we really want?

While questions of accountability are important in maintaining (or re-establishing) the credibility in government, I fear we have become distracted from the greater moral question facing us: What is torture and are we willing to condone it?

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