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.

by Matthew Spalding

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.

by Samuel Gregg, DPhil (Oxon)

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.

by Robert Royal

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.

by Marc D. Guerra

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.

by Kevin E. Schmiesing

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.

by Stephen J. Wolma

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.

by John Farina

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.

by William F. Campbell

John Courtney Murray and the American Civil Conversation

In John Courtney Murray and the American Civil Conversation, many different viewpoints converge and, with only a few exceptions, further Fr. Murray’s understanding of the essential need for civilized, rational discussion. All but perhaps three of the thirteen essays proceed in the spirit of Murray. The book is divided into three main sections. In the first section, essays by Richard John Neuhaus and William R. Luckey stand out. Neuhaus’ essay, from a purely stylistic point of view, is a joy to read.

by Neal Fuller

The Church and the Revolution

What Weigel calls the “Standard Account” gives primary credit for the Revolution of 1989 to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Advocates of this interpretation argue that two tenets of Gorbachev’s policy proved to be the conditions sine qua non for the eventual success of the Revolution: the Soviet army would no longer intervene when its allies chose to go their own way and the Soviet party would no longer demand exclusive communist control of central and eastern Europe.

by John-Peter Pham

With Liberty and Justice for Whom?

Gay identifies three distinct positions on capitalism among evangelicals: those held by the evangelical left, right, and center. Each of their positions are treated with utmost fairness, a feat which by itself makes the book, and Gay himself, worthy of high praise.

by Bruce G. Webb

The Social Crisis of Our Time

Those who, like the Swiss economist Wilhelm Röepke, dislike both a laissez faire economy and a planned or state-manipulated one usually hope for a “Third Way” skirting both. Originally published in 1942, this thoughtful, richly textured work is Röepke’s first formulation of the “Third Way.”

by John Attarian