Books for Any Season
Religion & Liberty Online

Books for Any Season

It’s the time of year when the experts among us proffer gift lists, a subset of which is book lists. I’ll spare you my own book list, per se, but it has been a while since I used this space to note some new titles of interest at the intersection of faith and economics. Here then, some noteworthy books (whether they are appropriate for those with whom you exchange Christmas presents, I leave to you):

Are Economists Basically Immoral? A collection of essays by Paul Heyne, published posthumously.

Rethinking Rights, edited by Bruce Frohnen and Kenneth Grasso. Another important entry in the ongoing critique of a liberalism that grounds rights too insecurely in the benevolence of the contemporary state.

Handbook of Economics and Ethics. The latest in Elgar’s series of reference works on key issues in economics.

The Wisdom of Generosity: A Reader in American Philanthropy. The vigor of charitable work in the United States has been often remarked. Here William Jackson gathers excerpts from a wide variety of sources to furnish a sense of the character and motivation of American giving.

Rethinking Business Management, edited by Acton’s Sam Gregg, with James R. Stoner, Jr. The proceedings from a Witherspoon Institute Conference on the subject, bringing together philosophers, economists, and theologians in a timely examination of the need for business education reform.

Kevin Schmiesing

Kevin Schmiesing, Ph.D., is a research fellow for the research department at the Acton Institute. He is a frequent writer on Catholic social thought and economics, is the author of American Catholic Intellectuals, 1895-1955 (Edwin Mellen Press, 2002) and is most recently the author of Within the Market Strife: American Catholic Economic Thought from Rerum Novarum to Vatican II (Lexington Books, 2004). Dr. Schmiesing holds a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. in history from Franciscan University ofSteubenville. Author of Within the Market Strife and American Catholic Intellectuals, 1895—1955 (2002), he serves as Book Review Editor for the Journal of Markets & Morality. He is also executive director of CatholicHistory.net.