Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Christian Social Thought

How the Bible encourages business

When was the last time you heard a Christian talk about how godly and pious it is to earn money? I can’t remember ever hearing that in church. Christians don’t like to talk about accumulating wealth, but they do like to talk about giving money to the poor and the needy. Continue Reading...

John Paul II on work, socialism, and liberalism

This year marks the 30th anniversary of John Paul II’s important encyclical, Centesimus Annus. While the average lay person might not pay attention to formal pronouncements by the Roman Catholic Church, papal encyclicals are significant in their affirmation of the church’s social doctrine. Continue Reading...

The 3 things you need to make ‘socialism’ work

Occasionally, our antagonists think they have discovered the silver bullet argument in favor of “Christian socialism.” One such apology recently came into my inbox. In its entirety, it read: Acts Chapters 4 and 5 Tell of The Holy Spirits Work with The Apostles to Establish SOCIALISM for The Christian Church…What further proof is needed ??? Continue Reading...

Murray Rothbard on Christianity, Catholicism, and theology

A hidden gem of Murray Rothbard’s thinking on the “Whig Theory of History” was published by the Mises Institute here in 2010. This publication was excerpted from an edited transcript of “Ideology and Theories of History” (ITH), the first in a series of six lectures on the history of economic thought given by Rothbard in 1986, published here in 2006. Continue Reading...

How does human work further human dignity?

For all the claims regarding the subjectivity of economics, including schools of thought that emphasize subjective value theory and the descriptive rather than the normative, much mainstream economic thought focuses on what seems to be objective and measurable. Continue Reading...