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The Faith of the Founding

From the April 2003 Print Edition

My colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Walter Berns, has written that the philosophy of John Locke was decisive in the American founding. According to Berns, Locke’s disguised but unmistakable aims were to break with the traditional Christian understanding of nature and to drive . . . . Continue Reading »

The Embodied Self

From the February 2003 Print Edition

In the very first year of his papacy, Pope John Paul II planted a time bomb in the Church that is not likely to go off until about twenty years from now. Beginning in September 1979, he devoted fifteen minutes of each weekly general audience over a five“year period to sustained, dense, and . . . . Continue Reading »

Another Islam

From the November 2002 Print Edition

Beginning in the thirteenth century, the three monotheistic religions parted ways, with the Jewish and Christian world going in one direction and the Islamic world going in another. We are still coming to terms with that split. But the three faiths still hold more in common than we typically . . . . Continue Reading »

Defining Social Justice

From the December 2000 Print Edition

Last year marked the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Friedrich Hayek, among whose many contributions to the twentieth century was a sustained and animated put-down of most of the usages of the term “social justice.” I have never encountered a writer, religious or philosophical, who . . . . Continue Reading »

Economics as Humanism

From the October 1997 Print Edition

For more than a century now economics has been advanced and practiced as a science, on the model of physics and mathematics. It was not always so. From Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776 until well after the publication of John Stuart Mill’s . . . . Continue Reading »