A lot of the books piled up by my treadmill recently seem to be about things we don't see, sometimes because they're too small but other times because they've been covered up or forgotten. Here are ones worth noting.
Faith-based Fab Four
| President Bush's new appointees face big challenges
by Marvin Olasky
Posted 2/10/01, 12:00 am
The new White House Office for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives that President Bush established last week (see our cover story) will be small, with his Texas aide Don Willett and "civil society" theorist Don Eberly, both Protestants, joining Steve Goldsmith (who is Jewish) and John DiIulio (who is Catholic). The Faith Fab Four, though, will have a large political task: to gain congressional and popular support for a program that tries to reverse a generation-long trend to establish secularism-more bluntly, atheism-as government's preferred belief system.
George W. Bush has emphasized that his administration will not try to control or limit the independence of religious institutions-and yet, government grants commonly do bring oversight that can take a bite out of liberty. The way out of this dilemma is to distinguish carefully between two types of government grants, formula and discretionary, and then examine the elements of discretionary grants that can create shackles.
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