The best part is when they put up excellent blog posts so all I need to do is tell you to go read them, instead of having to say something intelligent myself.  

First, then, you might want to check out Jordan Ballor’s fine little post on Acton, “It Takes a Village to Raise a Business” in which he cautions conservatives against rejecting too summarily the solidarist view of society asserted in President Obama’s much-maligned speech last week, when he went so far as to say, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”  Ballor reminds us “We all know at some level that we didn’t get where we are on our own, and that we have an ongoing responsibility and dependence on others for our continuing enjoyment of the goods of human existence.”  Ballor thus points us back toward a more authentic conservatism and away from the modern individualist (and thus thoroughly unconservative) variety.

For a more fleshed-out look at what this older conservatism might look like, you couldn’t do much better than Steven Wedgeworth’s recent post at the Calvinist International on “R.L. Dabney’s Theory of Economics.”  Dabney, a Southern Presbyterian stalwart much beloved by modern-day Reformed conservatives for his trenchant and prescient critiques of the agenda of the rising centralized secular state, may shock many of his admirers for his allegiance to pre-capitalist concepts of the role of business in society, the need for government to restrain inequality, the need to restrain luxury spending and usury, etc.

Finally, on a somewhat different note, Lue-Yee Tsang reflects on the contemporary tempest in a teapot over here as to whether Parliament will intervene to advance the women bishops agenda in the Church of England.  While opposing Parliament’s stance on the particular policy, and pronouncing them unfit to govern church affairs so long as they persist in their current godlessness, Lue-Yee nonetheless offers a unapologetic defence of antidisestablishmentarianism (10 points for using that word!) along the lines of Hookerian two-kingdoms theory.

Go, read, be edified.