Acton’s latest volume offers thoughtful reflection on the intersection of economics and ethics amid the disruption of the pandemic.

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The newest issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality (Volume 24, Number 1) has been released in print and online at our website.

In my editorial for the issue, I offer a preview of its contents:

To use popular terminology, through reflecting on the “known unknown”—the hour of our deaths, the return of Jesus Christ—we fortify ourselves for the “unknown unknowns” of our ever-changing world. As the economist Frank Knight put it, “It is a world of change in which we live, and a world of uncertainty. We live only by knowing something about the future; while the problems of life, or of conduct at least, arise from the fact that we know so little.”

… After “a world of change” in this journal’s editorial staff over the last few years, I write now as its executive editor, succeeding friends and mentors in the honor of publishing the foremost scholarship on the morality of the marketplace, of faith and of freedom. Thoughtful, academic reflection on such matters as triage practices in the care of COVID-19 patients, papal proclamations on the role of technology in modern life, the moral foundations mercial society, the relations of evangelical employers to transgendered employees, the role of the church in post-Soviet Slovakia, and the relevance of moral and theological movements for economic ethics—all these and more, at their best, are a form of watchfulness. Whether or not we agree with any given thesis, what matters is whether such scholarship challenges us (and, most importantly, its authors’ colleagues) to think more deeply about how best to live today, whatever our callings may be, whatever e to pass.

I also introduce our new book reviews editor:

This issue also marks the first for our new book reviews editor, Dr. Michael Douma, assistant research professor of the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University and director of the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics. I have already benefited from the added experience and expertise he brings to this journal, and I look forward to working together with him for issues e, with the hope that the Journal of Markets & Morality may be oil for the lamps of our minds, that in the light of faith and intellectual dialogue and reflection, we might in some small way be better prepared for days and hours unknown.

You can learn how to subscribe to the journal on our website.