The newest issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality has been published. The issue is available in digital format online and should be arriving in print in the next few weeks for subscribers. This issue continues to offer academic engagement with the morality of the marketplace and with faith and the free society, including articles on economic engagement with Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical letter Caritas in Veritate, biblical teaching on wealth and poverty, schools as social enterprises, the Reformed philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd’s economic theory, and much more.

As we have done in the past, Jordan Ballor’s editorial is open access, even to non-subscribers. In “Between Greedy Individualism Editorial and Benevolent Collectivism” he examines the enduring impact of Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, writing,

At the time of its publication, Novak’s work must have been like a window thrust wide open in a dank room, introducing a breath of fresh air and the sanitizing rays of sunlight. Against ideologies that posit state power as a neutral or even benevolent force arising of necessity against the rapaciousness of the market, Novak observed instead that it was democratic capitalism that arose first as a system designed to check the invasiveness of state tyranny. The “founders of democratic capitalism,” wrote Novak, “wished to build a center of power to rival the power of the state.” Indeed, “they did not fear unrestrained economic power as much as they feared political tyranny.” Still more would they fear the union of economic and political power that we find all too often today in corrupt and cronyist regimes.

You can read his full editorial here.

In addition, for the first time we are offering the first two entries in our Controversy section as open access as well. The question at issue is “Should Students Be Encouraged to Pursue Graduate Education in the Humanities?” Given the state of education in the United States and the looming student debt bubble, such a discussion could not be more timely. You can read the first entry by William Pannapacker here, and the first response by Marc Baer here.

This issue also features another installment in our Scholia section of early modern translations, “What Kind of Corporeal or Political Life Men Would Have Professed in the State of Innocence” by Francisco Suárez, translation and introduction by Matthew T. Gaetano. The Scholia feature is available to subscribers only, which they can access here.

Last, memorate our 15th year and 30th issue, we introduce a new special feature in this issue: an index cataloging all our contributions from volume 1, issue 1 (Spring 1998) to the present. The high quality and volume of content that we have been privileged to publish over the years is staggering. As I write in the index introduction,

Taking back the scaffolding of years of work and surveying the edifice hidden beneath has revealed an achievement that simultaneously humbles and evokes a sense of pride, but not a single wall of this building could have been built apart from the research, scholarship, and labor of our many contributors.

And I will take this opportunity to thank those contributors once again.

This index is also available open-access here. In the future, we intend to include one index per volume, appearing in our Fall issues.

You can browse the table of contents of our newest issue here.

You can register at our website and subscribe to the Journal of Markets & Morality here.