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.

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Marriage Woes

Marriage is in deep trouble in America, and indeed throughout most of the Western world. The numbers tell the story. By the mid-nineties, nearly one-fifth of all white children in the U.S. lived in single-parent families, almost always headed by mothers. Well over half of all black children now live in such mother-only families. These percentages represent a spectacular increase from just a few decades ago.

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Hot Topics in Economics

Bulls, Bears & Golden Calves: Applying Christian Ethics in Economics by John E. Stapleford (Intervarsity Press) is both a reference for Christian thinking on specific economic topics and a helpful companion to the major economics texts of our day. The list of chapters reads like a recipe for staying up all night in group debate or private turmoil (depending on your inclination): environmental stewardship, legalized gambling, debt relief for less developed nations, population control, pornography, immigration.

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Creation of Wealth

The prosperity and way of life in many countries of western civilization (namely Germany, Holland, Switzerland, England, and the United States of America) have existed for a few hundred years now. Much like those who lived in the Roman Empire, the sheer force of this history may persuade contemporary members of secular society to feel invincible against the demise of this prosperity and way of life, demanding it as a birthright rather than accepting it as a delicate heirloom.

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Conservatism, Socratically and Succinctly

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.

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A First Amendment Primer

In 1789, with the War of Independence well behind them and the prodigious task of writing a constitution for the new United States of America also completed, the Founding Fathers turned their attention to the individual rights of the citizenry. Thomas Jefferson, in particular, thought that the constitution was incomplete for failing to address the primary freedom of religion. Following the successful passage of his Bill of Religious Freedom in the Virginia Legislature, he brought the issue before the larger Constitutional Convention.

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God, Reason, and the Law

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.

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Character for Free

During a recent lecture at Loyola University New Orleans, Michael Novak argued that for centuries individuals have been asking the wrong questions. Up until around 1776, he said, people inquired, “What is the cause of poverty?” Novak suggests they should have been asking what Adam Smith asked—that is, “What is the cause of the wealth of nations?” Or in other words, why are the rich rich?

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John Paul II Remembers the Twentieth Century

In 1993, Pope John Paul II met with Polish philosophers Józef Tischner and Krzysztof Michalski to discuss the events of the twentieth century, namely the rise of Nazism and communism. The Holy Father revisited the transcripts from these conversations and added to his earlier thoughts, expounding on democracy, freedom, and the future of Europe. The resulting work is Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium, published in March by Rizzoli.

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An Orthodox View of Contemporary Economics, Politics, and Culture

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.

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Democracy Does Not Ensure Liberty

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.

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Technology, Culture, and Christianity

The commercial success of the Matrix franchise is em- blematic of a pervasive cultural curiosity about the nature and future of the relationship between technology and humanity. In The Matrix: Reloaded, the savior-figure Neo has a conversation with Councillor Hamman, one of the leaders of the last human city Zion. Neo and Councillor Hamman travel to the engineering level of the city, where Hamman observes, “Almost no one comes down here, unless of course there’s a problem. That’s how it is with people.

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