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Natural Law and Modern Economics
It is probably fair to say that many Christian intellectuals regard the positivist, rationalist social sciences with some suspicion. Many Christians would reject outright the proposition that the human person can be studied with the same tools and with the same detachment as inanimate objects. Probably many more Christians would be willing to make limited use of social science research, without accepting the whole philosophical apparatus that seems to go with it.Cuba is Part of the Pope's Evangelical Mission
Commentators are still trying to understand just what Pope John Paul II was up to in visiting Cuba. Surely, many muse, the most skillful geopolitical strategist to ever preside in the papal suites must have had a secret political agenda. Is he trying to do for Cuba what he did for Poland? Or, as several dispatches have suggested, does he feel an ideological attachment to Fidel Castro’s anticapitalist economics?Subsidiarity and Health Care Reform
An employee of a large regional bank is concerned because the bank’s health insurance covers payment for abortions. She has no alternative source of insurance. Millions of others are in the same predicament, since most plans routinely fund the procedure.Human Capital and Poverty
- The main purpose of economics is to understand and to help alleviate poverty, and there is an intimate and transparent relation between investments in human capital and the alleviation of
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Medical Technology, Medical Ethics
The usual line on medical ethics goes something like this. In the old days, ethics and medicine weren’t often in conflict. The physician intervened to save lives when he could, but his main limitation was technological. Nowadays, however, we have the technology to keep life going for an indeterminate period, blurring distinctions between life and death. This reality necessitates that doctors and families make difficult decisions about when to pull the plug.The New Testament and Public Life
From the historical beginnings of the Christian movement, there has been an understanding that the governing authorities of the world are under the providence of God. According to Saint Paul, government serves a valuable and divinely ordained purpose until the Parousia, when the return of Christ will fully inaugurate the new creation.Misesian Economics and the Bible
One of the several magnificent intellectual achievements of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881—1973) was his development of a comprehensive science of human action, called “praxeology.” One of the main conclusions drawn from praxeology is that free markets will result in more prosperity than government-directed economic activity–a position that naturally makes Misesian economics popular with conservatives.Toward a New Liberty
The 1991 papal encyclical Centesimus Annus has been described as prompting a springtime in Christian social teaching because it makes it easier to see freedom, specifically economic freedom, as a moral mandate. The sad truth is that the two traditions that come together in Centesimus Annus–religious orthodoxy and classical liberal social theory–have appeared to be at odds with each other for the better part of three centuries.Liberty and the Good Life
U-Turns may be prohibited on interstate highways, but it became the standard traffic pattern in the Republican Congress elected in 1996. Republicans did not contest President Clinton’s plan to balance the budget. They just wanted to do it earlier. They did not object to Clinton’s tax cuts. They just wanted more of them. Republicans want to help families educate their children. But not as expensively or intrusively as do the Democrats.Of Markets and Morality
The great mantra of this prevailing culture of self-absorption is tolerance: If only everyone, everywhere, and under all circumstances could only be tolerant, we are assured, what a wonderful and peaceful world it would be. This kind of illiberal faith, this chic toleration, is so intolerant as to assert the truth claims of orthodox Judaism and Christianity.Scholastic Economics: Thomistic Value Theory
It has been seventy years since historian Richard Henry Tawney concluded in his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism that, “the true descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labor theory of value.” By this, he appears to mean that Saint Thomas Aquinas’ writings in value theory entail the proposition that the basis of value of an economic good is the amount of human labor expended in producing it. Thus, Tawney adds, “the last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx.” Tawney was, of course, mistaken.The Reformation Roots of Social Contract
Contrary to much secular thought, the historic emergence of a social contract that guarantees human liberty stems from the seedbed of Geneva’s Reformation. To be sure, a different social contract, the humanist one, had its cradle in the secular thinking of the Enlightenment.