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September 10, 2010

Chrysostom on the Poor

From On Living Simply, Sermon XLIII. (HT: American Orthodox Institute Observer, et al.): Should we look to kings and princes to put right the inequalities between rich and poor? Should we require soldiers to come and seize the rich person’s gold and distribute it among his destitute neighbors? Continue Reading...
September 09, 2010

Review: The Battle

On his website, David Bahnsen reviews The Battle: How the Fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future by Arthur C. Brooks: The strongest points of the book, and the reason Brooks has done such critically important work here (World magazine has already recognized the book as its Book of 2010, by the way) are found in these two areas: (1) The moral nature of the battle that exists (2) The fundamental materialism that underpins the left’s approach towards creating income equality. Continue Reading...
September 09, 2010

Review: ‘The Great Wilhelm Röpke’

On the The American Spectator website, Theodore Roosevelt Malloch reviews Wilhelm Ropke’s Political Economy, a “brilliant, analytical intellectual history” from Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg. We are extremely grateful then to the brilliant researcher and scholar, Samuel Gregg of the Acton Institute, for a concise, penetrating, and thorough analysis of Röpke’s contribution to intellectual life. Continue Reading...
September 08, 2010

Labor and the limits of work

There has been some good discussion over the past week and Labor Day holiday about the nature of work and its role in our lives (particularly here). The first thing I’d like to point out about Lester DeKoster’s claims regarding work is that he has in mind, at least partially, the classical Greek philosophical distinction between the active and contemplative life, particularly its disdain of manual labor. Continue Reading...
September 07, 2010

Toward Sustainable Wealth and Profit

Today’s NYT has an op-ed by David Brooks that’s been getting good cyber-circulation, “The Gospel of Wealth.” Brooks highlights in particular Southern Baptist pastor David Platt, who is touted as the youngest mega-church leader in the country. Continue Reading...
September 04, 2010

Jeremy Lott’s Life of William Buckley

The Thomas Nelson company sent me AmSpec alumnus Jeremy Lott’s William F. Buckley. I will write a full review later, but I have just begun the book and can already tell that Lott is going to bring attention to some underappreciated territory. Continue Reading...