Check out these recent articles from around the web:

Making Work Pay (for Children) by Anna Sutherland: “Mandating paid parental leave would help parents to establish a strong bond with their new babies, and it would make breastfeeding for at least a few months more feasible for working mothers. A homecare allowance could allow a parent to further delay returning to work, or arrange for whatever child care arrangement is best for their family, and widening access to high-quality center-based child care would ensure that more children receive consistent supervision. Worker benefits like paid sick leave and flexible hours—which can coexist with a competitive economy—would help parents to accommodate their children’s needs, and could consequently reduce their work-related stress.”

Stairway to Wisdom by David Brooks: “Love is a form of knowing and being known. Affection motivates you to want to see everything about another. Empathy opens you up to absorb the good and the bad. Love impels you not just to observe, but to seek union — to think as another thinks and feel as another feels.”

The Holocaust is not a he-said, she-said debate by Michael Gerson: “About 1.4 million Holocaust victims were under the age of 14. It is one of the most solemn responsibilities of educators to make a new generation see what was done.”

Loss of Vocation and the Demise of the University by Patrick Deneen: “Among the most pervasive ruptures that today mark the daily life of a campus—informing the divides between and even within the disciplines, between faculty and administrators, between student life and academic life, and so on—is the division that we designate between service and career. We put these into separate boxes (or buildings), the one informing our lives as volunteers and voters, the other as economic actors.”

Pro-Life Environmentalism & Dogma by Michael Sean Winters: “I believe we Catholics are called to protect the environment. I believe we Catholics are called to protect the unborn. I believe we Catholics are called to protect the undocumented. I believe we Catholics are called to protect the marginalized. I believe we Catholics are called to protect the poor. I believe we Catholics are called to protect the elderly and the inform. No amount of scientific data or economic theory or legal reasoning can persuade me that any of these concerns can or should be set aside…”

Why Dawson Opposed Our Bourgeois Mind by R. Jared Staudt: “Dawson’s prophetic voice proclaims the need to reevaluate our view of wealth. It is a means and not an end. We need to refocus on our true end to transform our post-bourgeois culture into a genuinely Christian one.”

Tears of a Rickshaw Driver by Nicholas Kristof: “As China prospers and builds an educated middle class, demands for participation will grow. I’ve covered democracy movements around the world, from Poland to South Korea, and I’m confident that someday, at Tiananmen Square, I’ll be able to pay my respects at a memorial to those men and women killed that night.”

Former Chinese Dissident: “Escalating Crackdown” on Churches in China by Bob Fu: “Unless and until the United States and the rest of the international community step up and send an unequivocal message to the Beijing leadership that this trampling of religious freedom is totally unacceptable, China’s ruling Communist Party will feel free to expand this crackdown on crosses into a nationwide campaign.”

The Death of Saints I Never Knew by Andrew Staron: “But what Fr. Frans and Dan both offer is a glimpse into the fathomless depths of the mystery of God and into the life that is born in and of complete love of that mystery. And such life—made beautiful by love—calls to us. It invites us to begin to think and live in terms of what we have heard. And it encourages us to a renewed attention to the embodied breath of grace in the world, a reverence for the concrete circumstances that open us to this grace, and a hope-filled devotion to the God of resurrection.”

Third Of South Sudan’s Population Faces Starvation by Reuters: “More than a third of South Sudan’s population, 4 million people, will be on the edge of starvation by the end of the year as fighting rages on in the world’s newest country, U.N. officials said on Tuesday.”

Wassup at America? by Michael Sean Winters: “The moral equivalence Patterson floats is typical of the ‘blame the West’ foolishness I associate with the worst ideological excesses of the twentieth century. It is a thing I had hoped we had gotten past.”

Financial reform group says Francis visit lends credibility by Joshua McElwee: “The pontiff met Wednesday morning with the leaders of Jubilee USA, a Washington-based alliance of some 75 organizations, 400 faith communities, and 50 global partners that works for issues like debt relief for developing countries and reform of international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund. Eric LeCompte, the group’s executive director, said in a phone interview following the meeting that the pope took several minutes during the audience to listen to specific concerns the organization has regarding the global financial system.”