Author: Jim Bowman

Jim Bowman covered religion 1968-78 for the Chicago Daily News, since then has written books, articles, etc., mostly on corporate history but also on religion (Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968), and more recently on politics (Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters -- Lulu.com, Kindle). Longtime Oak Park, Illinois, resident, he lives now on Chicago's North Side, where four of his and Winnie's six children live close by.

End the Shutdowns! Do It For the Children

Otherwise, they die the death.

Hundreds of thousands of children could die this year due to the global economic downturn sparked by the coronavirus pandemic and tens of millions more could fall into extreme poverty as a result of the crisis, the United Nations warned on Thursday.
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Compared with adults, children infected with the coronavirus are less likely to have symptoms and more likely to have a mild illness, U.S. and Chinese studies have found.

But the U.N. report warned that “economic hardship experienced by families as a result of the global economic downturn could result in an hundreds of thousands of additional child deaths in 2020, reversing the last 2 to 3 years of progress in reducing infant mortality within a single year.

Poverty kills.

via Power Line

Rebecca West’s Unique Take on Communism & Whittaker Chambers

Writers & Writing

Headline above caught my immediate interest, having read Rebecca West and found her (a) very interesting and (b) thorough.

This subhead, however, reminds me of a common irritation:

West understood more clearly than anyone the allure of Communism for educated Westerners

Anyone else. Please. (She being someone, right?)

via National Review

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‘No worker without rights’: Pope Francis advocates for universal basic income in ‘this time of danger’

Sunday sermons, weekday observations

Holy meddler!

The pope expressed his belief that the time is now to consider the concept of universal basic income in an Easter Sunday letter about the coronavirus pandemic sent to the leaders of major social movements.

“This may be the time to consider a universal basic wage which would acknowledge and dignify the noble, essential tasks you carry out,” Francis wrote. “It would ensure and concretely achieve the ideal, at once so human and so Christian, of no worker without rights.”

The pope also said that some low-income workers “have been excluded from the benefits of globalization.

He’s a sucker for the utopian solution.

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