In this week’s Acton Commentary, “The middle class in an age of inequality,” I wonder who will defend the bourgeois virtues, if anyone will “speak out in praise of mediocrity, stability, and predictability.” Continue Reading...
In Dierdre McCloskey’s latest book, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, she builds on her ongoing thesis that our newfound prosperity is not due to systems, tools, or materials, but the ideas, virtues, and rhetoric behind them. Continue Reading...
Can we live the good life in the world of finance and banking? Acton’s research director, Samuel Gregg, explores that question in his latest book For God and Profit: How Banking and Finance Can Serve the Common Good.Continue Reading...
Over at the blog of the Catholic University of America’s School of Business and Economics, Drs. Chad and Brian Engelland, authors of an article on consumerism and the cardinal virtues for an upcoming issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality, share their insights on the challenge of consumerism in a commercial society:
Is consumerism an inevitable by-product of capitalism?Continue Reading...
“No work? Then nothing else either. Culture and civilization don’t just happen. They are made to happen and to keep happening — by God the Holy Spirit, through our work.” –Lester DeKoster
As we begin to discover God’s design and purpose for our work, there there’s a temptation to elevate certain jobs or careers above others, and attempt to inject our work with meaning from the outside. Continue Reading...
Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg contributed this piece to today’s Acton News & Commentary. Sign up here for the free, weekly email newsletter.
+++++++++
Humility in a Time of Recession
By Samuel Gregg
Since 2008, there has been much discussion about the contribution of unethical behavior to our present economic circumstances. Continue Reading...
This week’s Acton Commentary:
Does the market inspire people to greater practical virtue, or does it eviscerate what little virtue any of us have?
Far from draining moral goodness out of us—as many think—the free market serves as a “school of the practical virtues.” Continue Reading...
It’s perhaps serendipitous that I’m beginning to read Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values on the same day that the first Values Voter Debate is going to be held in Ft. Continue Reading...