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Why a Free Society Needs the Family
Children who spend their formative years deprived of the love and attention of caring families often have grave difficulties forming attachments throughout their lives. Locked away inside themselves, they care nothing about what others think of them—whether love, hate, or indifference. Only fear of physical force or loss of privileges can motivate them to good behavior. Otherwise, these damaged children do what they rationally calculate they can get away with—lying, cheating, stealing, and hurting others without conscience.Christian Faith and Modern Democracy
A committed Roman Catholic, Robert Kraynak has produced one of the most significant political books for American Catholics since John Courtney Murray's We Hold These Truths. A professor of political theory at Colgate University, Kraynak deserves mention along with Murray, Jacques Maritain, and Reinhold Niebuhr as a thoughtful commentator on the most profound of issues. His work will shake any reader, secular or faithful, to rethink the relationship between one's citizenship and one's faith.Globalization and the Kingdom of God
G lobalization and the Kingdom of God contains the annual Kuyper Lecture, presented at the Center for Public Justice in 1999, along with responses by three commentators. The lecture was delivered by Bob Goudzwaard, Professor Emeritus, Free University of Amsterdam. Goudzwaard also served in the Dutch Parliament in the 1970s and is a well-respected authority on issues of Christian faith, economics, and public policy.What Is Common about the Common Good?
John Calvin, reflecting on the truths found in “secular writers,” concluded that “the mind of man, though fallen and perverted from its wholeness, is nevertheless clothed and ornamented with God's excellent gifts” ( Institutes, ii.2.15). Richard Mouw, in He Shines in All That's Fair (the text of his 2000 Stob Lectures), exhorts us to take hold of this insight, lest we miss in this world signs of God's common grace.Fighting Poverty with Virtue
Is America returning to a tradition of moral reform that had been rejected one hundred years ago? Consider the titles of the two major pieces of antipoverty legislation, each of which represents a generation's approach to this perennial social problem. The War on Poverty was ushered in by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, while the recent welfare reform legislation was the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.A Humanist for Our Time
The story of Wilhelm Röpke's life is that of a genuine Renaissance man—though in the tradition of Erasmus rather than Machiavelli. It is the tale of a man who combined profound knowledge of several intellectual disciplines with a genuine confidence that people can indeed know the truth. But one of the strengths of John Zmirak's new intellectual biography is that it underlines the extent to which Röpke's life was also a tale of profound moral witness to truth.Environmental Virtues-and Vices
Religious writing on the environment generally fails for several specific reasons. First, most theologians and religious ethicists do not have a gift for science. Environmental science is especially hard because it requires, at a minimum, a good grasp of chemistry, physics, geology, and various subdivisions of biology.Rising to the Challenge of Modern Capitalism (Or Not)
What is the relationship between Christianity and the modern world? Is the spirit of capitalism fundamentally incompatible with the requirements of charity that were first formulated in the New Testament? While these have always been important questions for Christians, they have taken on a renewed sense of urgency. The recent terrorist attacks on New York and Washington forcefully reminded Americans that they cannot escape the question of the relationship between God and politics.Tracing the Matrix of Nationalism and Capitalism
The debate over Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has “still not gone off the boil,” wrote Anthony Giddens in 1976. It seems that Weber’s striking thesis, a quarter of a century after Giddens’s remark, has still not lost any of its steam, a fact manifested by its ability to provoke the thought and research of a scholar as able as Liah Greenfeld.Freedom Undone in the Court
There I sat, blinking under the fluorescent lights in the auditorium style classroom during my constitutional law class. I had gone to law school because I wanted to learn how to be a lawyer. I wanted to learn how to “think like a lawyer.” That's what all the marketing brochures from the admissions offices in law schools all over the country promise incoming students. I didn't know exactly what it meant to think like a lawyer. I assumed I would be asked to use reason and logic to apply the facts of a particular occurrence to the law that governed such an occurrence.After Ideology
The book asserts that modernity has reached a dead end that is the inevitable result of its own inner logic. That logic is best described as revolt against God. Here, Walsh’s debt to Eric Voeglin is evident. The modern revolt, Walsh argues, has its origins in the Gnostic claim that humans can, through a secret gnosis and an act of their own, transform themselves into the Divine. That Gnostic quest has lived on in various forms in the West, which include Comte’s positivism and Marx’s communism.Adam Smith in His Time and Ours
Let me resolve this paradox by stating that Jerry Muller is a Professor of History at the Catholic University of America. He has written a book which economists and libertarians ought to read. It is also written in such a style that the general reader can derive great benefit from it. The book deftly summarizes a mass of scholarship from many different areas–political philosophy, ethics, psychology, history, and literature–without trivializing it into bland encyclopedic entries.