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From the NOR Dossiers

Economics & Catholic Social Teaching

Should Christians Pay Reparations for Racial Injustices?
April 2021The Church can engage in the work of racial reparations, but only while placing the project within a broader moral framework.
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Socialism: A Christian Heresy?
April 2020Socialism rejects the salvation of Jesus Christ and insists that man can be “freed” through the destruction of Church, family, and community.
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The Vatican’s Filthy Lucre
January-February 2020Peter’s Pence doesn’t solicit funds for financial speculation that fattens the Vatican’s investment portfolios; the fund shouldn’t be used that way.
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A Map for the Christian Family-Man
March 2019Instead of frittering away his time, a young man needs to take charge of his livelihood and plan his own family-centered home economy.
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Perfecting the Social Order
December 2018The foundations of Catholic social teaching are not in economic morality but in Catholic doctrine about the state and the nature of the human person.
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Cooperation & Supernatural Brotherliness
September 2018Subsidiarity and solidarity were practiced in Cape Breton under the influence of the Catholic social-justice experiment, the Antigonish Movement.
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Making Sense of Papal Economics
October 2015A review of Papal Economics: The Catholic Church on Democratic Capitalism, from Rerum Novarum to Caritas in Veritate
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Can Free-Market Principles Reverse America's Decline?
May 2014A review of Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Future
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More Valuable Than Money
November 2012The Church's teaching office is highly centralized, but her finances are highly -centralized -- making for a system prone to mismanagement and abuse.
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Man-Child in the Promised Land
September 2012Men have suffered from the 'single-mother revolution': A significant subculture of unattached fathers exhibits a notable lack of maturity and a retardation of genuine masculinity.
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Cornered by the Market
May 2012Once the 'market mentality' infects a society, authentic human relations suffer. Do we want a market economy or a market ? Where should consumerism end?
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Is Your Job on the Endangered-Species List?
June 2011As the economy and culture become increasingly feminized, how long will it be before we start speaking of a "glass ceiling" for men?
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American Catholics: Unclear on the Concepts
March 2011Are American Catholics dense? That seemed, at first blush, to be the underlying message delivered by Peter Kodwo Appiah Cardinal Turkson.
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Get Married, Save the Economy
October 2010One aspect of the gay-marriage brouhaha has largely gone unnoticed and merits consideration: Gay marriage is good for business.
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Business Ethics According to Pope John Paul II
September 2009All our actions in enterprise must be, according to John Paul II, "in conformity with the dignity and integral vocation of the human person."
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The Enemy Within
December 2008Why are wealthy bankers being handed golden government parachutes while our neighbors who are being foreclosed are kicked to the curb?
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The Traditional Catholic Worker Movement
January 2008Dorothy Day's movement is a solid expression of traditional Catholicism, rooted in the spirituality and thought of the Church.
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The Church’s Social Patrimony
July/August 2006A review of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace
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The Background to ‘Rerum Novarum’
February 2006Review of Catholic Social Teaching: An Historical Perspective by Roger Aubert, edited by David A. Boileau
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Absolute Economic Power Corrupts Absolutely
November 2005Review of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and A Theory of Personalism
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A Giant Among Catholic Economists
February 2005Review of Lehrbuch der Nationalöko-nomie/Teaching Guide to Economics by Heinrich Pesch
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Possessed by Our Possessions
September 2004Review of Take Back Your Time: Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America edited by John de Graaf
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Why (Most) Women Will Never Again Be Happy
May 2004What happens when the professional-class woman has children?
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Is Globalization Inevitable?
April 2004Review of Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Report of the International Forum on Globalization edited by Berrett-Koehler
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The Social Purpose of Private Property
March 2003Review of Managing as if Faith Mattered: Christian Social Principles in the Modern Organization by Helen J. Alford, O.P. and Michael J. Naughton
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Debt Relief the Cyrenian Way
June 2002The Cyrenian approach to debt relief is personal: he lends a debtor money out of his own pocket at an unbeatable interest rate — nothing.
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The "Stumbling and Tripping" of Executive Pay
December 2001Good will not come from maximizing stockholder wealth, but rather from reconnecting capital to labor and communities with a stake in it.
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"The Church's Best Kept Secret"
February 2001Although the Church’s social doctrine is an integral part of her patrimony, it has elicited little interest, even from Catholics.
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Can Economic Justice Be Achieved Without Law?
October 2000Economics must be about more than what I do with my property; it must concern itself with the needs of the whole human race.
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Preparing for the Return of The Catholic State
May 2000Honoring Christ as Sovereign King is not contrary to or unrelated to the human person’s fulfillment, but rather it is a necessary condition for it.
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The Scandal of Catholic Teachers' Pay
April 2000If states offer school vouchers to parents, then states should require teacher salaries commensurate with what public-school teachers are paid.
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'Power to the People' Can Only Mean Property to the People
January 2000Capitalism and socialism begin with a practical materialism that elevates things over man or, worse, reduces man to a thing.
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The Religion of the Marketplace
September 1999This Faith has three basic dogmas: the primacy of desire, the creative energy of competition, and “nonjudgmentalism.”
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Neither Statism nor Individualism
June 1999If we are to subject all our being, thinking, and living to Christ and His Church, we cannot ignore the existence of Catholic social teaching.
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The Sovietization of American Women
May 1999John Paul II wrote, “The mentality which honors women more for their work outside the home than for their work within the family must be overcome.”
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Capitalism Is Squandering Its Inheritance
April 1999Free enterprise in its earlier stage was the unwitting and ungrateful beneficiary of generations of hardworking, God-fearing people.
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Our Economy of Paper & Hot Air
September 1998The inflated paper value of our corporate structure as reflected in stocks has not the remotest connection to real capital.
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The Americanization of the Globe
February 1998It is in the economic and political interests of the U.S. to ensure the world’s common language is English, and common standards are American.
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Why the Frathouse Boy With the Adam Smith Tie Doesn't Look So Smart These Days
March 1996 VIEW ARTICLE




The Problem Is Not Too Many People
June 1995In most circles it is an article of unquestionable faith that the world has a population problem. But are there too many people for one earth?
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Anti-Capitalism on the Southern Horizon?
July-August 1993Review of The Two Churches: Catholicism & Capitalism in the World System
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A Case Study: Laying Off American Workers, Gouging Mexican Workers
January-February 1992 VIEW ARTICLE
The Importance of Catholic Social Teaching for Envisioning the Good Society
November 1991 VIEW ARTICLE



Liberation Theology
July-August 1990Review of Liberation Theology and Its Critics: Toward an Assessment, Liberation Theology: A Documentary History, and Gustavo Gutierrez: An Introduction to Liberation Theology
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Economics as if God Mattered
January-February 1990Review of Ethics and the National Economy
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The Underclass, Part V: Children & Violence
December 1989We see kids on the street with guns and stacks of $100 bills. There’s no rule of law, no belief in anyone’s laws -- not man’s, not God’s.
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The Underclass, Part IV: Schools & Mentors
October 1989One youth says, “I look at those teachers and their books, and I say: man, you’re out in space, and I’m where I am, and there’s nothing between us.”
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The Underclass, Part III: Drugs
September 1989How else to think of drug use — by anyone, living anywhere — as but the most obvious evidence of nihilism, of despair?
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The Underclass, Part II: Widespread Teenage Pregnancy
July-August 1989Girls in the ghetto are hungry for love, and desperately afraid of not going along with the social, cultural, and sexual pressures of the street.
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Why Socialists Should Drop Marx
June 1989Marx should neither remain a dominant theorist of the worldwide democratic socialist movement, nor the source of ideas, strategy, or analysis.
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The So-Called Underclass, Part I
June 1989Why don’t the “underclass” want to leave it? Is there, perhaps, some failure not of psychology or school experience but of the moral imagination?
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The Obsolescence of Left & Right
April 1989The “crisis of modernity” remains unresolved by a “sham conservatism” that merely sanctions the unbridled pursuit of worldly success.
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The Pope Confounds the Neoconservatives
April 1989Review of Aspiring to Freedom: Commentaries on John Paul II's Encyclical "The Social Concerns of the Church"
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The Social Thought of Michael Novak: At Odds with the Principles of Catholic Social Thought
November 1988 VIEW ARTICLE



The Workers of Weirton Steel: Putting Catholic Social Teaching into Practice
December 1987 VIEW ARTICLE



American Conservatism’s Lost Soul
April 1987Review of The Search for Historical Meaning... The Capitalist Revolution... Conservatism... Alexis de Tocqueville... and Irving Babbitt in Our Time.
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Implementing the Catholic Social Vision
March 1987Review of A Preface to Economic Democracy by Robert A. Dahl
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A Victim of Spiritual Poverty
December 1986I know a successful businessman who is a victim of spiritual poverty, and some materially impoverished people I’ve met are spiritually affluent.
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Heinrich Pesch & the Economics of Solidarism
November 1986Pesch designed an economic system that is opposed to both liberal capitalism and state socialism and is based instead on Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical premises.
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Capitalist Self-Seeking or Christian Self-Denial?
October 1986Christ’s earthly work, and ours, will be done when crosses are no longer needed for the salvation of men — when the poor are no longer with us.
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Short-Term Thinking & the Decline in Values
September 1986We are controlled by numerical systems run amok — creating lists and statistics, SAT scores and Nielsen ratings, Gallup and Harris polls, and the fearsome “bottom line.”
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On “Liberation Theology”
September 1986A poor woman once told me that the Church “belongs” to her kind of people, not to them, the rich, the quite comfortable — appearances notwithstanding.
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The Vatican’s New Look at Liberation Theology
June 1986The Church has attempted to correct the excesses of radical liberation theology and that “dualistic” Christianity that views the Church as a fortress and calls on Christians to retreat within its walls.
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Haiti: Discovering Wealth in Poverty
May 1986We are blind to the vast and real poverty of our own country, which may only become apparent upon encountering spiritual wealth.
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A Critique of the Second Draft
May 1986The people of the USA are unwilling to make the right to a job a top priority and to get up the money to pay for it, even though they can easily afford to do so.
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Reinhold Niebuhr & Benigno Aquino
April 1986Niebuhr believed that many of the values of democratic society, while highly prized in the West, are neither understood nor desired outside the West.
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The Catholic Bishops & the Political Theory of Philanthropy
April 1986Morality based on the opening of the soul expressed by the prophets of Israel, the mystic philosophers of Greece, and the authors of the Gospels defies all calculations of self-interest and promises joy.
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The Sanctity of Life & the Right to Adequate Health Care
March 1986Infant mortality, life expectancy, and disability rates confirm that the poor and uninsured permanently suffer the consequences of our broken healthcare system.
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Insatiable Love
March 1986Gandhi, after an early distaste for Christianity because of its relationship to imperialism and aggressive “soul-savers,” came to a deep identification with the message of Jesus.
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Bad Things & Good People Revisited
March 1986Vertical religion and horizontal religion are parts of an integral whole. You go up by going sideways, and you go best sideways by focusing upward.
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Mother Teresa: Guided by Those She Guides
March 1986Mother Teresa started as her own version of a street person, so to speak, and the vision she had was as simple as Christ’s vision has always been.
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Billy Graham to the Rescue?
January-February 1986I fantasize that some contemporary Nathan the Prophet might chat with the President, not about sins like adultery and murder but about social sins. I’m afraid a Catholic bishop would not be right for the part.
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Jacques Maritain’s Friendship with Dorothy Day
December 1985Maritain and Day were of one mind on the use of private property toward the common good, and their desire to “exist with the people.”
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The Rough Edges of Socialism
October 1985Contemporary socialism of the democratic, Western European form hasn’t yet eliminated all its sharp edges.
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Is a Union Good or Bad?
September 1985Don’t believe the talk that unions have had their day, that the trend from blue-collar to more white-collar and service jobs has spelled their doom in the U.S.
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On the Bishops’ Draft Pastoral on the Economy & the Hostile Reactions to It
September 1985Conservatives' slogan “Mater, si! Magistra, no!” can only mean that papal teachings don't count for much compared to their superior wisdom.
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The Vatican Looks at Non-Marxist Socialism
July-August 1985In its universal concern, the Church cannot be a mouthpiece for the West, even if, as a result, the Pope is accused of “misunderstanding the free-market economy.”
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Physician, Heal Thyself
July-August 1985A curious schizophrenia afflicts the corporate body of American Catholic institutions when it comes to the question of how to deal with a trade union.
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The Motherhood of the Church
June 1985If the priest were to overcome the counter-stigmata of the man with clean hands, and the Church go beyond almsgiving, the priest would have to roll up his sleeves and get dirty.
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Nicaragua & Neighborliness
May 1985The U.S. could have weaned Nicaragua away from the Soviets by the exercise of a little good neighborliness and the avoidance of a large amount of international immorality.
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The Truth About the A.C.T.U.
April 1985The resistance of American workers to communist domination of their trade unions was based on something far more solid than anti-communist hysteria.
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The Odyssey of an American Priest in Guatemala
April 1985My name was placed on a hit list; I was accused of being a communist. At the same time we were leafleted by guerrillas, who were attacking our stand on nonviolence.
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Did the Bishops Strike Out in Pawtucket?
March 1985A real difficulty with the bishops’ pastoral letter on the U.S. economy is the ignorance and apathy of both laity and clergy.
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Comments on the First Draft of “Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy”
March 1985The average Catholic will ask himself, “What can I and my parish do for economic justice? How should my spiritual life affect my social behavior and my habits of consumption?”
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The Two Minds of Modern Conservatism
January-February 1985The ultimate pitfall of classical liberalism is the annihilation of morality and the destruction of meaningful community life.
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The Vatican & Liberation Theology
January-February 1985Liberation theologians, Catholic and Protestant but mostly Catholic, have been a major factor in struggling against poverty in Latin America.
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Toward a More Christian Economy
December 1984America is ripe to accept the Christian-Catholic view of work and economics, once it fully learns to understand and appreciate it.
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Ethical Reflections on the Economy
December 1984This statement was attacked by business leaders and the prime minister, and was the subject of a full-scale debate in the Canadian Parliament.
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Economics & the Theology of Work
November 1984When the worker is engaged in work that is to him intrinsically meaningless, then he is deprived of work in the deeper sense, even when he makes a living wage.
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The Development of Social Doctrine
November 1984A Christian’s concern for the material well-being of his neighbors springs, properly, not from a flat secularist social-welfare mentality but from an authentic interior spirituality.
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The Right to Unionize & Defense of the Poor
November 1984The tradition of Catholic social teaching has roots in Abraham, Moses, the prophets, and in the very life and message of Jesus himself.
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“Radical” Bishops
October 1984The Church Fathers argue that the only justification for holding private property, beyond meeting one’s personal necessities, is to give it away!
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Price Markups & Moral Decline
September 1984The circulation of goods and services is a good. What is bad is the disorder that is introduced into this circulation by acts of injustice.
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Considering the Lilies of the Field
July-August 1984Jesus tells us to be anxious about others, and he promises that if we are anxious about others first, then we need not be anxious about ourselves, for all these things will be added unto us.
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Impressions of Nicaragua — Part II
May 1984In the well-to-do sections of Managua, the Pope’s picture may be seen displayed proudly on the doors of houses, in any number of windows.
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The Relevance of Riches & Poverty
May 1984The question remains for us, how do we obey the precept, the commandment to share our superfluous goods with the poor?
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Socrates on Communism & Capitalism
May 1984Socrates asks, What do you think would happen to a capitalist nation if everyone practiced the greedlessness of Jesus, or Buddha, or even Thoreau?
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Impressions of Nicaragua — Part I
April 1984Recently I went with two of my sons to Nicaragua, where we spent time visiting schools, hospitals, clinics, a number of Managua’s barrio homes, and those of other cities.
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A Christian View of Economic Virtue
March 1984Let us consider the free-market principle that competition should be the governing factor of the economic order.
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Can a Political Conservative Be a Christian?
January-February 1984The Christian conservative must not subsume his religion under his politics and thereby pervert a timeless Gospel into an ideological weapon.
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Samaritan Woman
December 1983“I suppose we better call an ambulance. The hospital’s gonna cry and moan, but it’s the best chance we got of getting this guy out of our hair."
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Social Justice & Hell-Fire
December 1983The Works of Mercy originated in a hell-fire sermon that Jesus preached as a final summary of his teaching, a sermon reported in the 25th chapter of Matthew.
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