During the holiday season, business people are routinely excoriated for being greedy and not doing enough for society. In the model of Scrooge before his conversion, they are said to be selfish when they should be looking out for others. Yet in my pastoral experience, I have found this to be untrue. For several years, I have conducted seminars for entrepreneurs, some of whom run America’s panies, to help them reconcile their faith with their business life. And what...

The proper role of government, the central concern of political theory, has long been a controversial issue within Christendom. Disputes continue today. From right to left, clerics claim that God stands on their side. There is, it seems, no simple Christian view of the state. And for good reason: Holy Scripture and church tradition give us guidelines and principles, but no detailed blueprint as to godly government. On most individual issues we are left with the apostle James’ injunction...

We do not often think that Jesus Christ and the New Testament justifies capitalism. To the extent that capitalism means greed and self-indulgence, I should think not! Greed and self-indulgence are root human sins and will be manifested in any economic system But if you think of capitalism as economic liberty, then there are several New Testament passages that argue in favor of it. I want to explore three passages that bring out foundational issues regarding the nature of...

To the joy of Catholics who support capitalist institutions, the U.S. Bishops have at long last applied the principle of ecumenism to economic issues. The vehicle is a short ten-point “Catholic Framework for Economic Life,” passed unanimously at this year’s meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. es ten years after “Economic Justice for All” the Bishops’ controversial pastoral letter that disappointed so many businesspeople. The new document departs from years of confusion, in which the Bishops appeared...

I recently visited a friend of mine in Tuscany, an American artist named Shelly Goldstein. Shelly paints impressionist landscapes of the Tuscan countryside, with plenty of poppies, olive groves, herds of oxen, orchards, and usually the remains of an ancient torre, or an isolated chapel already centuries old when Columbus was a boy in Genoa, or off in the distance a typical little Tuscan town perched on a hilltop. Shelly paints in other parts of the world as well--Africa,...

To anyone familiar with its vast and growing literature, the environmental movement seems dominated by darkness. Consider the messages of just a few of its more vocal segments: • The biological egalitarianism of the “Deep Ecologists,” whose founder, Norwegian ecosopher (philosopher of ecology) Arne Naess declares, “the equal right to live and blossom is an intuitively clear and obvious value axiom. Its restriction to humans is an anthropocentrism with detrimental effects upon the life quality of humans themselves.” •...

The Genesis account of creation is clear on a central point that many secular environmentalists find scandalous: The earth is entrusted to the human family for our use. After God created man and woman in his image, he blessed them with the words: “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the seas, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move on this earth.” This is the...

Her name was Anna. Her mother was an alcoholic, and she and her live-in boyfriend were unemployed. Looking for an apartment and a job was overwhelming, because she had never done so before. She had no savings, no furniture, and few clothes. Anna was estranged from her older daughter and her husband. She was cynical and believed in nothing because she had seen little in life to trust. Truth was a matter of expediency to her—she did and said...

The news from the front is encouraging. “Welfare reform working,” shouts one USA Today headline. “Welfare rolls falling,” another paper declares. The bold new course of reform charted by the 1996 welfare reform act appears to be on a path to success. In Arizona, there is a surge of married men looking for, and finding, jobs. In Florida, welfare rolls have fallen seventeen percent in just seven months. Nationwide, states are reveling in the additional 1.5 billion dollars in...

In the last few years, there has been a revival in interest in the role that private charity can play in the revitalization of civil society. This renewed interest is partly driven by an overwhelming sense that most of us have, regardless of political and ideological interests, that the modern welfare state has produced less-than-impressive results. I would take this analysis much further: The welfare state has been plete disaster, in some instances creating, and in others enhancing, a...

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. The one I refer to as the social covenant (to distinguish) has resisted tyranny, totalitarianism, and authoritarianism with consistent and irrepressible force; the other has led to oppression, large-scale loss of life, and the general diminution...

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...