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Those who rush to other gods bring many troubles on themselves. I will not take part in their sacrifices; I will not worship other gods. [Ps. 16:4 (TEV)] Recently I graded the final exams for a Christian ethics course. On a question about premarital sexual intercourse, I found that I was generally giving higher …
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Any society, Christian or not, has both a sacred sphere and a profane sphere, a sphere in which love and obligation determine who gets what as against the sphere in which prudence and courage do so. And the two cannot be disentangled. We all live in families, and a church can be viewed from this …
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A battle has been joined that is reminiscent of an earlier episode in church history. Fundamentalists and modernists in the oldline Protestant churches once disputed the proper relationship between religion and science, or between scriptural revelation and a rationalist outlook inherited from the Enlightenment. That fight was resolved in favor of the modernists who maintained …
Continue reading “Captialism and Christianity: Pulling on Both Oars”
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Ten years ago, even five years ago, the American market economy was the model for and the envy of the world. The marvelous flexibility of our economy, our belief that "change" is a good word, our constant striving for innovation were and are factors that make ours an economic system that can compete with — …
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"The year 1989," declared former U.S. Ambassador Jack Perry to our Charleston Foreign Affairs Forum, "will go down in history as annus mirabilis — a year of wonders." Many had thought, he continued, that communism and all the governments that flew that ideological banner would come to an end; but no one could have predicted …
Continue reading “Communism’s Collapse: The Receding Shadow of Transcendence”
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For some people religious life and business practice are integrally related in a creative tension. For others-both clergy and business professionals-the worlds of church and corporate life are galaxies apart, separated by ignorance, hostility, apathy, language, interests, values. But to profess Christ and participate in the Christian community requires us to affirm a connection between …
Continue reading “Connecting Ministry with the Corporate World”
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From the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century nationalism was the dominant force in Western history. It took over from Christianity when Christian fanaticism plunged Europe into appalling and intolerable conflicts. The era of nationalism came to an end when it, in turn, plunged Europe and the whole world into appalling and intolerable conflicts. …
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Book Review: The Essential Agrarian Reader. Edited by Norman Wirzba. University Press of Kentucky, 256 pp. The farmer’s diner in Barre, Vermont, serves the foods you would expect at a diner — ham and eggs, home fries, hamburgers, milkshakes. And it serves them at prices you would expect — the average check is about …
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When I was a teenager growing up on Long Island, one of my favorite excursions was a trip to see the great Gilded Age mansions of the North Shore. Those mansions weren’t just pieces of architectural history. They were monuments to a bygone social era, one in which the rich could afford the armies of …
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Book Review: The Market System: What It Is, How It Works, and What to Make of It By Charles E. Lindblom. (Yale University Press, 304 pp.) Development as Freedom By Amartya Sen. (Knopf, 382 pp., paper-back.) Cities sell the names of their sports stadiums to the highest corporate bidder. Coke and Pepsi compete for vending …
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The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington By Maurice Isserman. Public Affairs, 431 pp. Countless times in his career, Michael Harrington heard himself introduced as "the author of The Other America, the book that sparked the war on poverty." His other books on democratic socialism tended to get short shrift. Harrington was a friendly, …
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Thomas’s thought, wrote one biographer, was a mixture of Christianity, anarchism and Marxism (Bernard J. Johnpoll, Pacifist’s Progress: Norman Thomas and the Decline of American Socialism, Quadrangle, 1970). The biographer might just as accurately have characterized it as an outgrowth of the 19th-century Social Gospel movement. Walter Rauschenbusch, who developed a Social Gospel theology most …
Continue reading “Norman Thomas: Socialism and the Social Gospel”
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A recent visit to the heavily guarded border between South and North Korea reminded me of going through Checkpoint Charlie at the Wall between East and West Berlin in the 1970s and 80s. The stiff efficiency of soldiers working the gates, the hard eyes of security people, the sound of heavy boots on stone roads, …
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The Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff has pursued a broad range of interests, including political philosophy, aesthetics, metaphysics and the philosophy of religion. He was recently professor of philosophical theology at Yale University and before that taught for many years at his alma mater, Calvin College. He has been president of the American Philosophical Association (Central …
Continue reading “Rights and Wrongs, an Interview with Nicholas Wolterstorff”
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Julie clawson needed a new bra. Most of the time Clawson, a Chicago-area pastor, would have just gone to the store, plunked down some cash and headed home with a new bra. But she had been reading about globalization, and her conscience made her wonder where her money was going and what was being done …
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Much of the political comment coming from theologians these days has a socialist flavor. I was surprised, therefore, to find a theologian arguing the case for capitalism in the editorial pages of the Washington Post (“A Closet Capitalist Confesses,” March 14, 1976). Especially was it surprising to find Michael Novak in this role, for in …
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The new conventional wisdom has pronounced socialism dead. Economists of the Austrian and Chicago schools (von Mises, Hayek, Friedman) long ago announced that it would and should die. In the 1970s a number of influential neoconservatives embraced capitalism with the enthusiasm of new converts. Now even committed socialists like Robert Heilbroner have conceded defeat. In …
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Book Review: The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy. By William Greider: Simon & Schuster 384 pp. Saving Adam Smith: A Tale of Wealth, Transformation, and Virtue. By Jonathon B. Wight. Financial Times/ Prentice Hall. 352 pp. In the compelling story of capitalism the protagonist is the free individual who willingly exchanges …
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Book Review: How Companies Lie: Why Enron Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg. By A Larry Elliott and Richard Schroth. Crown Business, 200 pp.. Saving the Corporate Soul & (Who Knows) Maybe Your Own: Eight Principles for Creating and Preserving Wealth and Well-Being for You and Your Company Without Selling Out. By David Batstone. …
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Professor of political science at Columbia University Andrew J. Nathan is keen on the tenacity of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to survive and stay in power, by its selective responses to the demands of certain sectors of Chinese populace and expedient reforms and relatively democratic ways within the government—all are to him, indications of …
