Alex Adrianson highlights for the Heritage Foundation’s “Insider Online” blog a different take on Pope Francis’ latest encyclical.

The Pope’s encyclical was built up in the press to be a statement about the environment, but it’s really a statement about the importance of culture, writes Ryan Anderson:

Culture is central because it affects everything else. Francis highlights that a “throwaway culture” harms both social and physical ecology: “When we fail to acknowledge as part of reality the worth of a poor person, a human embryo, a person with disabilities—to offer just a few examples—it becomes difficult to hear the cry of nature itself; everything is connected.” Later he connects this throwaway culture to the plague of abortion:

[C]oncern for the protection of nature is also incompatible with the justification of abortion. How can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other vulnerable beings, however troublesome or inconvenient they may be, if we fail to protect a human embryo, even when its presence is uncomfortable and creates difficulties?

A culture of care for all creation will help us overcome the tendency, which Francis bemoans, to divide our concerns: “It is clearly inconsistent to combat trafficking in endangered species while remaining completely indifferent to human trafficking, unconcerned about the poor, or undertaking to destroy another human being deemed unwanted.”

And as for environmental or other policy issues?

Francis is clear that “the Church does not presume to settle scientific questions or to replace politics.” Everyone concerned with the values Francis highlights will need to investigate the relevant empirical facts and consider, in light of them, which policies will best promote those values.

Francis seeks “to encourage an honest and open debate so that particular interests or ideologies will not prejudice the common good.”