On February 2, 1516, Girolamo Zanchi was born in the northern Italian city of Alazano. Orphaned at age fourteen, Zanchi joined the local monastery of the Augustinian Order of Regular Canons. In 1541, Zanchi transferred to the priory of San Frediano in Lucca where Peter Martyr Vermigli—one of the most well-known and influential of the Italian Reformers—was the prior. Under Martyr’s guidance, Zanchi studied the works of some of the leading figures in the Reformation, including Martin Bucer, Philip Melanchton, Heinrich Bullinger, and John Calvin, and adopted many of their theological and political views. The turbulent political and...

In a recent review of Robert P. George’s The Clash of Orthodoxies, Samuel Gregg, Director of the Acton Institute’s Center for Economic Personalism, observed that “we have witnessed something of a renaissance of natural-law thinking among Christian scholars.” Another piece of evidence of this renaissance is The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post-Christian World by constitutional scholar and natural-law theorist Russell Hittinger.

The First Grace is not only an original but also a challenging contribution to the natural-law discourse. The book is divided into two sections. The first, entitled “Rediscovering the Natural Law,” argues that the modern conception of natural law and natural rights is not only wrong but also profoundly misleading. To...

Contrary to the libertinistic assumptions pervading our contemporary society, property rights, liberty, and even life itself—the bases of any functional economic order—do not exist as ends in themselves, but rather as elements within a greater framework of religious faith and morality. Historically, Christianity established this religious and moral framework for Western culture. Today, to the extent a larger framework is recognized at all, contemporary advocates, both Christian and secular, tend to rely on human dignity by itself to furnish this greater moral framework. But we must take care to remember that human dignity includes more than just each individual person’s dignity or rights.

Traditional Christian anthropology views human beings as participating in both the temporal and the...

Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) was the younger brother of the famous Karl Polanyi, one of the staunchest critics historically of Western society and capitalist values. Trained as a physician, Polanyi undertook a career as a chemist. Polanyi, a native of Hungary with a Jewish heritage, immigrated first to Germany, where he proved his brilliance as a scientist. When the Nazis hijacked German politics in 1933, Polanyi ventured to Great Britain. There his interest shifted from physical to social sciences. The concept of spontaneous order, on which F. A. Hayek would later build his theory of cultural evolution, stems partially from Michael Polanyi’s...

In his latest book, Dinesh D’Souza offers a glimpse into a one-sided dialogue on both the merits of and the ideas behind conservatism. He does this by publishing his letters to a curious and interested college student named Chris—who is questioning his own politics and starting to form his own beliefs. These letters each cover one specific topic, many of the so-called “hot” ones—for instance, conservative as opposed to liberal, libertarian, political correctness, feminism, education, abortion, and everything in between.

While the book itself is “one sided”—we never see the “young conservative’s” letters—the dialogue is not. This is because the book prompts thoughts, opinions, questions, and concerns both by Chris and by the reader. It is,...

President George W. Bush has stated that the goal of the military campaign is to bring liberty to the people of Iraq. Although he is less specific about exactly which types of liberty, he would surely include economic and religious liberties. The president is a strong supporter of freedom in the marketplace, and he is strongly committed to freedom and vitality in matters of faith and religion. But some might wonder whether it is doable in Iraq, a country notably lacking in Western liberties.

The Iraqi population is about seventy-five percent Arab. Kurds, who live in northern Iraq, constitute about fifteen to twenty percent of the population. Smaller groups include Turkmens and Yazidis. In the rural areas of the country many of the people still live in tribal communities, leading a nomadic or semi-nomadic existence...

Richard M. Weaver lived a life of hard work, self-sacrifice, and quiet virtue. Although he taught English at the University of Chicago for the bulk of his career, he remained deeply attached to the traditions of his upbringing in North Carolina. The part of his Southern heritage that Weaver treasured above all was the “social bond individualism” that he pitted against what he called the “anarchic individualism” of the North. This social bond individualism coupled individual liberty with duty and social responsibility to advance a concept of “disciplined freedom.” Throughout his entire career Weaver defended the values of this social bond individualism,...