Sad news for those in journalism and publishing: Abandoning some of the best known names in trade publishing, the Nielsen Company said Thursday that it would shut down Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews, and sell a stable of other publications, including Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter, to a newly formed media company…. For generations, … Read more
The pope’s new encyclical, Caritas in Veritate (CV), is a “big” document, and I won’t pretend to dispose of it with a brief commentary. Like its ancestor, the epochal Rerum Novarum, it will work its way through the mills of hundreds of thinkers for decades to come — provoking responses by writers of every political … Read more
The economy is in free fall and we may be facing another Great Depression. In response, the government is scrambling to spend its way back to health. Is this really the best solution? Brian Saint-Paul spoke to Thomas Woods Jr., author of the New York Times bestseller, Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock … Read more
For the securities industry to unravel as spectacularly as it did in September, many parties had to pull on many threads. Mortgage bankers gave loans to Americans for homes they could not afford, often based on inflated house appraisals and no documentation of income or assets. Mortgage bankers immediately transferred these mortgage loans to Fannie … Read more
Catholics are seriously annoyed at the way the holiday season is changing. If you are among them, you are probably already annoyed at this article, because I didn’t say Christmas season. It is Christmas, for goodness sake, so why can’t we just say that? I received an e-mail the other day from Amazon.com headlined, “The … Read more
Frank J. Hanna III has become one of the leading Catholic philanthropists in the nation. His Solidarity Foundation recently obtained the oldest extant copy of portions of the Gospels of Luke and John and presented them to Pope Benedict XVI for the Vatican Library. A merchant banker in Atlanta, Hanna is the CEO of HBR … Read more
My piece last week on immigration flowed from my longstanding policy of spreading oil on the waters — then setting them on fire. Dozens of thoughtful responses offered a wide array of views on how to strike a Catholic balance between Church and state, mercy and justice, globalism and patriotism. But the most important question … Read more
Catholic social teaching has consistently held as its core principle that economic activity is to be subordinated to the common good, which the Catechism defines as “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.” Debate over precisely how the … Read more
We all have strange and contradictory wishes concerning what prices should be. We are outraged at what is happening to the price of gas and food. We don’t think they should go up. In real terms, we want them to fall, and they have fallen in the last decade and a half. That’s a good … Read more
You’ve surely heard of the economic stimulus payments that the government is planning to send out this summer. Most people will receive $300. The government hopes that we will all rush out to buy things, and that this will revive a slumping economy. Trying to stimulate the economy with an infusion of cash is not … Read more
During Lent, you will hear some version of the following from the pulpit: “This is the season to volunteer in charitable causes, to give back in service to the community, in a labor of love.” One cannot argue with the instruction here, or the sentiment behind it. Lent is indeed a time for giving and … Read more
See if you can spot anything wrong with the following claim, a version of which seems to appear in a book, magazine, or newspaper every few weeks for as long as I’ve been reading public commentary on economic matters: The dominant idea guiding economic policy in the United States and much of the globe has … Read more
 Paul and Patricia (Pat) Hundt are co-founders of Aquinas Academy, one of the first independent Catholic schools in the United States. Aquinas is a private school operated by Catholic lay people, dedicated to instilling traditional Catholic values in students from Pre-K3 through 8th grade. In 1991, with the help of several Catholic families, Paul … Read more