Christian Social Thought

March 11, 2020

Christian anthropology begins with you! Three texts for meditation

While seeing is believing, being is best. Being who you are is a lifetime’s work. This has been in the forefront of my mind this past month, as each week I’ve been turning out reading lists on natural law, how to think like an economist, and how to think and talk about politics. Continue Reading...

February 13, 2020

A concise natural law reading list

One of the occupational hazards of being a librarian is that people are always asking you for book recommendations. The truth is that recommending books is more difficult than it seems. Continue Reading...

February 03, 2020

Catholics and classical liberals, yesterday and today

In many countries, debates we had 40 years ago are starting to be rehashed: can one be both a Catholic and a classical liberal? It’s good to remember some of the arguments that liberal Catholics used then to justify their positions. Continue Reading...

January 28, 2020

Churches, tax exemption, and the common good

Are churches tax exempt as a matter of privilege or right? What does tax exception cost communities and churches? Christianity Today has been hosting an interesting debate on these issues. Paul Matzko, Assistant Editor for Tech and Innovation at the CATO Institute, argued in the cover story of this month’s issue that tax exemption comes at a high a cost to the communities in which they are located: This feeling that churches don’t contribute to the common good is not uncommon in America. Continue Reading...

January 23, 2020

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s crass Marxist materialism

During a Martin Luther King Day discussion with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., made clear that she is not just a democratic socialist but a Marxian one. Evie Fordham of Fox Business has written a helpful summary of the remarks, including Ocasio-Cortez’s concise explanation of the Marxist theory of the exploitation of labor: “No one ever makes a billion dollars. Continue Reading...

January 15, 2020

Why Scruton matters

The late Sir Roger Scruton, the eminent philosopher of aesthetics, politics, liberty, and culture, returned home to his Creator last Sunday. Scruton was famous, among other things, for running an underground university for Czechoslovakian dissidents during their country’s communist regime while teaching them Western philosophy, history and literature. Continue Reading...

January 13, 2020

Hayek, Catholic social teaching, and social justice

Last week David Deaval, Visiting Professor at the University of St. Thomas and 2013 Novak Award winner, wrote a very thoughtful essay on Fredrich Hayek, the question of social justice, and Catholic social teaching at the Imaginative Conservative. Continue Reading...

January 08, 2020

Tyler Cowen’s “State Capacity Libertarianism”: A Straussian Reading

On a recent episode of the excellent podcast Conversations with Tyler the economist Tyler Cowen reflected on the direction his and co-author Alex Tabarrok’s blog Marginal Revolution has taken over the last ten years: [I]n 2009 I was still experimenting in some fresh way with blogging as a new medium and what it meant. Continue Reading...

January 08, 2020

Richard Reinsch on Rubio’s ‘materialistic’ industrial policy

Last November, my colleague Dan Hugger critiqued comments by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) about his desire for “common good capitalism” informed by Roman Catholic social teaching. Generally speaking, this is an aspiration that many at the Acton Institute share, but the specifics of what that would look like are where the real differences lie. Continue Reading...

December 23, 2019

Clarence Thomas on the harmony of faith and reason

In the Christmas season, the secular West begrudgingly nods toward its faithful past. Yet amidst the darkness, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas joined with one the nation’s most distinguished colleges to highlight the compatibility of faith and reason. Continue Reading...

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