Michael Novak

My colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Walter Berns, has written that the philosophy of John Locke was decisive in the American founding. According to Berns, Locke’s disguised but unmistakable aims were to break with the traditional Christian understanding of nature and to drive . . . . Continue Reading »

In the very first year of his papacy, Pope John Paul II planted a time bomb in the Church that is not likely to go off until about twenty years from now. Beginning in September 1979, he devoted fifteen minutes of each weekly general audience over a five-year period to sustained, dense, and rigorous . . . . Continue Reading »

Beginning in the thirteenth century, the three monotheistic religions parted ways, with the Jewish and Christian world going in one direction and the Islamic world going in another. We are still coming to terms with that split. But the three faiths still hold more in common than we typically . . . . Continue Reading »

Last year marked the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Friedrich Hayek, among whose many contributions to the twentieth century was a sustained and animated put-down of most of the usages of the term “social justice.” I have never encountered a writer, religious or philosophical, who . . . . Continue Reading »

From the beginning of his papacy in 1939 until well after his death in 1958, Pope Pius XII was honored with unfeigned warmth by Jewish leaders around the world. Golda Meir was uncommonly effusive in her praise of him. Trees were planted in Israel in his honor. In 1955, the Israeli Philharmonic . . . . Continue Reading »

The collapse of communism in 1989 was one of the greatest events of human history—one of the most sudden, unexpected, dramatic, and utterly transformative. We are too close to it to be certain how to read it. Yet one characteristic of communism proved to be decisive—its particular form of . . . . Continue Reading »

Copyright (c) 1999 First Things 97 (November 1999): 39-42. Fifty years ago, a tangle of intellectual and diplomatic puzzles blocked the world from agreeing on a universal code of human rights. In the years 1945-1948 the world was emerging only slowly from the devastation of the war that had burned . . . . Continue Reading »

On March 19, 1998, the young social historian Eugene McCarraher delivered a portion of his doctoral thesis as a lecture at the Cushwa Center of the University of Notre Dame. His subject was Michael Novak, “The Technopolitan Catholic.” Though the lecture was highly critical of . . . . Continue Reading »

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor By David S. Landes. Norton 650 pages, $30. The irony of this major study of economic development is that its author writes as a complacent secularist and yet his fundamental thesis is theological. One can see this by . . . . Continue Reading »

For more than a century now economics has been advanced and practiced as a science, on the model of physics and mathematics. It was not always so. From Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776 until well after the publication of John Stuart Mill’s . . . . Continue Reading »