Learning Charity from an Exemplar

In the past three years on visits to church-based urban ministries nationwide, I have interviewed dozens of down-and-outers who have become up-and-comers: ex-welfare recipients, victims of domestic violence, former drug addicts, ex-cons. When I asked them what helped them turn their lives around, almost all responded, “A friend who cared.” Effective ministries know that friendship is a powerful poverty-fighting tool.

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Renewing American Compassion

We hardly need another polemic about the failure of America’s “war on poverty.” After decades of bitter wrangling and torpid inaction, there is at last a broad consensus that the welfare system is a cure no less malignant than the disease it was intended to remedy. Liberals and conservatives, politicians and program administrators, social workers and taxpayers have all been forced to acknowledge that the poor are not best served by our current lumbering and impersonal entitlement bureaucracy. They never have been. They never will be.

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Evangelical Political Activism: Faith and Prudence

The political resurgence of America’s evangelical community raises anew ever-important questions about religion and politics. In The Politics of Reason and Revelation, John West revisits some of those questions: “Does religion have a political role, and if so, what should it be? What are the advantages of religion in politics? What are the dangers?

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Capitalism

In the last century, every important economist aspired to write a complete treatise on economic thought. The idea was to build up an airtight theory, primarily by use of deductive logic, to explain how people overcome a central human predicament: Material desires always exceed resources, so what system should societies adopt in order to meet limitless needs and become prosperous?

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A Splendid Education in Free Market Economics

Faith of Our Fathers Mary Sennholz, editor 1997, 389 pp. Paper: $19.95 [ purchase this book ]

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Human Dignity and the Limits of Liberty

Advocates of liberty as the highest political virtue are regularly confronted by what I will call the libertarian accusation. When facing a staunch defense of liberty, especially economic freedom, conservatives and collectivists alike often nervously reply, “but isn’t laissez faire just morally dangerous? Don’t we need government to restrain powerful business interests?

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The Encyclical Legacy of John Paul II

Remarkable changes have taken place within the Roman Catholic Church under the papacy of John Paul II. As the twentieth century draws to a close, we see in retrospect that this century has witnessed in sheer numbers alone more deaths and wholesale destruction of human life and institutions that any previous.

by Gregory M. A. Gronbacher

Why America Needs Religion

Recently, University of Chicago professor Derek Neal undertook a study of the education of urban minority students, the same ones who are the much-vaunted “at risk” students regularly paraded out whenever the body politic even contemplates any change in the educational status quo.

by John-Peter Pham

American Catholic

The American Roman Catholic is a curious animal, forever trying to modify the docile, traditional, receptive spirit of the Catholic by the independent, innovative, frontier mentality of the American. Results of his endeavor vary from the impressive and influential to the disedifying and disastrous. His task is never-ending simply because it is impossible: “American” cannot modify “Catholic.”

by Rev. Paul Scalia

Wojtyla's Thought, John Paul II's Pontificate

As the years of his pontificate mount up, so do the books devoted to this singular pope, with the promise of some good things still in store, notably the forthcoming biography by George Weigel. From many angles, one has sought to fathom John Paul II’s secret, or perhaps to glimpse his distinctive gifts at work, a contemplative actor surely but patiently shifting the tumblers of the vault of history.

by Derek E. Cross

The Vocation of Enterprise

As its title implies, Michael Novak’s Business as a Calling brings a somewhat missionary zeal to the defense of commerce and capitalism, subjects that have been mainly exposed in the recent past to the zealotry of frenzied opponents. Mr. Novak’s effervescence and originality as an advocate and his rigor as a scholar make for a provocative and interesting read.

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Gentility Recalled

With crime and illegitimacy soaring, and cities often resembling Hobbes’s state of nature, where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” our policy wonks are hoping that national service, tax credits, etc. will manipulate us into coexisting decently again.

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