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Tracing the Matrix of Nationalism and Capitalism
The debate over Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has “still not gone off the boil,” wrote Anthony Giddens in 1976. It seems that Weber’s striking thesis, a quarter of a century after Giddens’s remark, has still not lost any of its steam, a fact manifested by its ability to provoke the thought and research of a scholar as able as Liah Greenfeld.Founding Faith
In On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding, Michael Novak amends the customary political history of the American founding to reinstate its religious underpinnings. Where most Americans do well in noting the Enlightenment elements of the American regime, they have been taught almost nothing about the religious—indeed, biblical—influence on the United States’ formation as a nation. Novak applies the corrective.Exit Truth, Enter Tyranny
Os Guinness, speaker of international renown, was born in China, educated in England, graduated from Oxford University, and authored several books, one of the most recent being a brief but lucid and powerful meditation on the crisis of truth in our contemporary Western world. The book is entitled Time for Truth: Living Free in a World of Lies, Hype, & Spin (Baker Books, 2000). Guinness' central thesis is that “truth matters supremely because in the end, without truth there is no freedom . . .After Nature's Revolt and From Apocalypse to Genesis
The environment is increasingly becoming a religious issue, as a host of environmental advocates attempt to “green” the church. More than a dozen volumes have been issued over the past two years alone, and new books seem to pour forth almost every day. Among the odder contributions—at least to anyone who believes in orthodox Christianity—are After Nature's Revolt and From Apocalypse to Genesis, both from Fortress Press.John Courtney Murray and the American Civil Conversation
In John Courtney Murray and the American Civil Conversation, many different viewpoints converge and, with only a few exceptions, further Fr. Murray’s understanding of the essential need for civilized, rational discussion. All but perhaps three of the thirteen essays proceed in the spirit of Murray. The book is divided into three main sections. In the first section, essays by Richard John Neuhaus and William R. Luckey stand out. Neuhaus’ essay, from a purely stylistic point of view, is a joy to read.The Church and the Revolution
What Weigel calls the “Standard Account” gives primary credit for the Revolution of 1989 to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Advocates of this interpretation argue that two tenets of Gorbachev’s policy proved to be the conditions sine qua non for the eventual success of the Revolution: the Soviet army would no longer intervene when its allies chose to go their own way and the Soviet party would no longer demand exclusive communist control of central and eastern Europe.With Liberty and Justice for Whom?
Gay identifies three distinct positions on capitalism among evangelicals: those held by the evangelical left, right, and center. Each of their positions are treated with utmost fairness, a feat which by itself makes the book, and Gay himself, worthy of high praise.The Social Crisis of Our Time
Those who, like the Swiss economist Wilhelm Röepke, dislike both a laissez faire economy and a planned or state-manipulated one usually hope for a “Third Way” skirting both. Originally published in 1942, this thoughtful, richly textured work is Röepke’s first formulation of the “Third Way.”Public Education: An Autopsy
Market based schooling sounds like a contradiction in terms to public school teachers' unions; it sounds like a non sequitur to hard-pressed denominational schools; it's Greek to the average taxpayer; but it's the next step to education critic Myron Lieberman.Beyond the New Right
Starting roughly from the mess we all admit we are in, John Gray, fellow in politics at Jesus College, Oxford University, subtly, valiantly, and sometimes brilliantly addresses all of the major problems facing liberal democratic society in this collection of four essays written during the past decade. Avowedly conservative in a lineage that links him with Michael Oakeshott (the greatest conservative theorist of our time, he thinks), F.A.A Jewish Conservative Looks at Pagan America
Don Feder reminds me of Paul Caplan, a Reform rabbi in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and of Peter Himmelman, perhaps the only practicing Orthodox Jew to carve out a career for himself in rock and roll. Like Rabbi Caplan and Peter Himmelman, Feder exhibits a palpable joy about his faith–and a passion strong enough to attract people in search of God. Feder, who writes editorials for the brassy tabloid The Boston Herald, writes about one experience at the office:The Churching of America
The award winning book The Churching of America is a dramatic rewriting of American religious history with a free-market bent.