Chuck Colson What intellectual tools do Christians need to effectively protect the truth in a post-Christian world, and do Christians have those tools?
This year marks the centenary of the promulgation of Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum. Over the next several months there will be a myriad of scholarly conferences, lectures, sermons, masses, etc., commemorating the anniversary of this seminal Church document and the tradition of social thought that it inaugurated. Collections of essays celebrating this anniversary are already beginning to find their way out of publishing houses and into stores and catalogs.
Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education has stirred a hornet’s nest of controversy in the academy for good reason – it is the only book-length attack on the policies that are in vogue at many of this country’s most distinguished academic institutions. The considerable press coverage this book has received indicates that D’Souza says something that badly needs saying and says it well.
The Foundation for Economic Education has sold, since 1950, approximately half a million copies of its edition of Bastiat’s The Law, in the Russell translation. This makes the book a “best seller,” despite that the Bastiat name is familiar to a mere handful. Few textbook surveys of political philosophies or economic theories mention him; few academics recognize the name.
Shelby Steele’s book, The Content of Our Character, is the best statement of its kind dealing with the issues surrounding racial antagonism often felt between black and white Americans. Written by a black professor of English who recently described himself to Time magazine as a “classical liberal,” this book is a striking analysis of the psychological factors involved in issues about race in the United States.
“Due to the automation” of E.J. Brill’s “systems” (forsooth!) this remarkable book has been kept waiting nearly two years for a notice. I hope that it will now receive at long last the attention–and the sales–it deserves.
Freedom, the first of two planned volumes, is Patterson’s attempt to explain why one culture valued liberty while so many others did not. His effort is of particular interest, given how long it took for freedom–with the concomitant protection of democratic electoral processes, economic opportunity, and human rights–to finally advance in Africa, Asia, and the one-time Soviet empire.
Thirty years later, Ellul still has plenty to say in The Technological Bluff, obviously because of the newer, high technologies of the computer chip and the laser beam. And he remains as negative as ever. The technological “bluff” is the implicit assumption in Western society the technological progress, if used rightly, is a good in itself, and the good will always outweigh less-welcome consequences. What has happened, Ellul contends, is that we have become slaves of “technique,” as he calls it, subservient to its survival at all costs.
R&L: Since obtaining your doctorate in economics from Yale, you have held positions as a research economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as a professor at Bates College, and now as a professor at Pepperdine University. Based on all of your study and these varied experiences, what would you say is the single greatest economic challenge facing the world today?