Religion & Liberty Online

Rev. Sirico on defending the free market

 Why should we care about human dignity, creativity and flourishing? Why value human creativity? Why even believe that human beings possess dignity and rights? As Rev. Robert Sirico writes in the Washington Times, the free market system assumes, rather than defends, the value of all these things—something easy to miss because most of us share these sentiments.

The religious foundation with which I was imbued as a child, and to which I returned after a spell in the wilderness of liberal activism in the 1970s, eventually allowed me to reach a place where I finally could speak the words of St. Augustine from my own heart: “Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi” — Late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you.

I came once again to know that there was a God and that he was personal. I knew that the world was formed by his design and infused with his purpose and that he fashioned the human race in his likeness, etching into us his own nature. And I knew that he wanted to be known by this world and that he had revealed himself in the person of his son, Jesus Christ, who established a church on the earth to carry forth this message.

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Joe Carter

Joe Carter is a Senior Editor at the Acton Institute. Joe also serves as an editor at the The Gospel Coalition, a communications specialist for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and as an adjunct professor of journalism at Patrick Henry College. He is the editor of the NIV Lifehacks Bible and co-author of How to Argue like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History's Greatest Communicator (Crossway).