The Acton Institute’s Moral Capital

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American Christians may have more in common with Bernie Sanders supporters than you think. A slim majority of self-identifying Christians hold an unfavorable view of capitalism, according to a 2013 Public Religion Research Institute survey. Pope Francis, the world’s most prominent Christian, consistently critiques free-market economics. Today millions of well-meaning Christians worry about capitalism’s compatibility with Christian values. What’s a committed Christian capitalist to do?

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Letters | Pius XII, Michael Novak, trans issues, etc.

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In his thoughtful essay on Pius XII (“Humanity’s Conscience?” February 24), John Connelly writes that I belong to the group of historians who allege that Pacelli, through his silence, aided Hitler and the Nazis. In fact, my thesis, and the significance of my book’s title, Hitler’s Pope, has a different impetus. My main contention is that as secretary of state under Pius XI, Pacelli negotiated in 1933 a treaty known as the Reichskonkordat, which unintentionally aided Hitler’s project at an early stage before the Nazi police state was established.

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The Late Michael Novak, Who Helped Bring Down The Soviet Union, Had Unusual Insights On Business

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Michael Novak, who died recently at age 83 from colon cancer, was a philosopher and theologian of the first rank. His writings on capitalism, democracy and religion had an enormous influence in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, they provided critical intellectual underpinnings that led to the demise of Soviet communism.

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Conservatives Do Believe in Social Justice. Here’s What Our Vision Looks Like.

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Last month, America lost a great defender of freedom, Michael Novak.

Novak was committed to rightly ordered liberty and cared deeply about the principles and practices that produce it. His enormous body of work emphasized the cultural prerequisites for political and economic freedom, as he stressed that economic conservativism and social conservatism are indivisible.

In the words of Heritage Foundation founder Ed Feulner, “Michael forced those of us trained in the dismal science of economics to explain that we should be more than ‘free to choose’—rather we should be free to make good free choices.”

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The Crisis of Liberty in the West

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The West faces a deep crisis of liberty. Full human flourishing is hindered by the dawning collapse of civil society and by crony capitalism and cultural cronyism. Natural law arguments, with their appreciation of rights and duties, provide a better framework than natural rights or utilitarian arguments for understanding economic liberty; a natural law conception of social justice recognizes the state’s role in economic justice but also requires respect for the proper authority of society.

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A Turn That Went a Long Way: Remembering Michael Novak

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Any adequate account of the swirling currents in Catholic intellectual life during the decades following the Sixties and Vatican II—think names like Wills, Greeley, Berrigan, Ruether, Hesburgh, Buckley—would have to give a major place to Michael Novak, who died at age eighty-three on February 17.

Novak was a frequent contributor to Commonweal from the late 1950s to the middle ’70s. In these pages and in the National Catholic Reporter, Timemagazine, and elsewhere, he was a skillful exponent of the work of Vatican II and a passionate champion of the radicalism arising from campus opposition to the war in Vietnam.

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Michael Novak Crafted a Moral Defense of Democratic Capitalism

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In 1960, at age 26, Michael Novak moved into a Manhattan apartment swarming with cockroaches. After 12 years of preparing for the Roman Catholic priesthood, he had abandoned that mission and would devote himself to writing—about exactly what, he wasn’t sure.

He realized, as he noted later, “there was no way to know how deep my talent ran.”

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Michael Novak and Karen Laub: A Love Story

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Michael Novak has now turned 80 — and what a privilege to have been present here and in Washington as so many have sounded his praises this week. We’ve heard from family members Ben, Jana, Mary Ann, and Rich; from editors, authors, philanthropists, and diplomats; from at least one Supreme Court justice – and from a standup comedian who moonlights as a constitutional-law professor named Hadley Arkes. To that list we can also add the wonderful speeches by Father Derek Cross, Samuel Gregg, Michael Pakaluk, Brian Anderson, David Dalin, and George Weigel, during the conference earlier this morning.

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Michael Novak, Friend of Economic Freedom

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The news of Michael Novak’s death Feb. 17 saddened close friends and colleagues in the community of think tank scholars who drew so much from his writings and lectures.

Novak’s perspectives expanded our conceptual grasp of economic liberty beyond dry formulas to include a more complete picture of the creative, human, and virtuous nature of entrepreneurship.

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