R&L: I understand that you have a unique way of doing business. Tell me about it.

Mataro: While maintaining high standards of quality for all our installation jobs, my approach is to hire and train young men—high school age or a little older—who are in trouble with the law, in school, or at home. Their parents, schools, or courts bring them to me. These young men are more to me than a mere source of business output. My wife and I house several of these young guys. We try to teach them a little bit of biblical beliefs as well as teamship and friendship. Meanwhile we help them learn a good trade that they can take anywhere in the world and use. That is what sets our company apart and makes it unique.

R&L: What motivates you...

Many of us have a maligned understanding of how to be compassionate to those in poverty. Currently, a debilitating welfare culture exists within nations that have adopted to some degree the welfare state model. Many of us have grown accustomed to viewing poverty and compassion narrowly. Eventually, we must face not just minor reform, but the overturning of the old paradigm. Those working in the private sector, to whom the new welfare responsibilities will fall, must begin to adopt the following three perspectives.

First, we can no longer believe that simply writing a check satisfies the call of compassion. The poor are asking for much more than our money. We must begin to make the more difficult sacrifices of our time, energy, and talents. We must go to the poor where they live and enter into their poverty in order to...

Eighty years ago, Woodrow Wilson took America into the twentieth century with a challenge to make the world safe for democracy. As we enter the twenty-first century, our task is to make democracy safe for the world”: the very significance of Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad is condensed in its brilliant last paragraph. Dr. Zakaria, who is the editor of Newsweek International and a celebrated commentator, is not the first who tries to complete the geography of the limits and restrains to be imposed on this peculiar form of government.

This effort has been one of the topoi of classical liberalism in the last two centuries: classical liberals were not that much concerned with the question “how many people are choosing the rulers?...

In 1946 Congress enacted changes in the tax code that per- mitted publicly-held business corporations to deduct charitable donations in amounts up to 5 percent of their federal taxable income. Congress, of course, did not require companies to make charitable donations, but it did wish to encourage them to do so. The legislation became one more landmark in a running controversy about corporate social responsibility.

Simply put, this controversy concerns the question of whether publicly-held business corporations (sole proprietorships and partnerships must be treated somewhat differently) have a duty to the communities in which they operate that goes beyond the duty to obey the law in the conduct of their operations. And if they have such a duty, questions remain about why they have that duty and what exactly it...

Many of the current economic problems in the United States have their roots in a currently pressing moral malaise. In these times of moral turmoil many have mistakenly equivocated government-sponsored welfare with the virtue of compassion. Compassion is frequently cited as a reason to justify state supported social programs. So an important question needs to be raised: Is governmental welfare truly compassionate? Are the human needs of the people really served with governmental handouts?

The theory behind the welfare state is that people need material provision. While no one can argue with that, likewise no one should forget the other aspects of human life. It seems that many consider material giving to be the sole way a person can give. One result of this materialism is the belief that the more money that is...

In 1967, following two decades of progressively harsher persecution of religion under communist rule, Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha triumphantly declared his nation to be the first atheist state in history. Hoxha, inspired by China’s Cultural revolution, proceeded to confiscate mosques, churches, monasteries, and shrines. Many were immediately razed, others turned into machine shops, warehouses, stables, and movie theaters. Parents were forbidden to give their children religious names. Anyone caught with bibles, icons, or religious objects faced long prison sentences. In the south, where the ethnic Greek population was concentrated, villages named after saints were given secular names. For the religious, a long nightmare of persecution and martyrdom was to follow.

Hoxha’s campaign destroyed life and...

One need not search far to find the supreme ethic by which we should evaluate all of our actions. The holy scripture is clear that we must love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind and that we must love our neighbors as ourselves (Matt. 22:36, 39). Love for God and neighbor must serve as the basis for any ethics. Here I am primarily interested in examining the love-for-neighbor portion of this supreme ethic within the context of personalism. This discussion will provide valuable insight, because personalism lends itself to the development of a love-for-neighbor ethics, given that the concept of the person is primary and foundational. Thus, a personalist ethics must start with and address ethics in terms of individuals. My particular interest is to construct a primer for personalist ethics...