Samuel Gregg recently recapped an ongoing debate among conservatives and Catholics in America concerning how best to evangelize the contemporary culture. Gregg (whose work I admire) contends that the so-called “Benedict Option,” i.e., imitating St. Benedict by withdrawing from a perverted society to preserve civilization, “isn’t open to … American conservatives … who take natural … Read more
Max Weber is justly famous for many things, but especially for having developed a theory about the relationship between capitalism and religion. The influence of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism remains considerable, not least because it has become a staple of sociological literature on the subject. Based on lectures he gave during a … Read more
I am a Catholic and it is the very intellectual foundations of the Catholic Church that drew me back to my faith. I grew up admiring Pope John Paul II’s battle against communism—a battle that we now know he played an integral part in. Pope Francis’s background is very different from his two most recent … Read more
For a generation, some Catholics in America believed that the Gospel injunction to help the poor meant to help them through government. Joined to that was a distaste for the WASP-dominated business culture of postwar American prosperity, even though Catholics had enjoyed the fruits of that prosperity along with other Americans. The long tradition of … Read more