Ralph McInerny
The Church and the world has lost an immense soul in the passing into eternity yesterday of Dr. Ralph McInerny, long time professor of philosophy at Notre Dame University. He was the modern epitome of the Renaissance Man: a towering intellectual, a Latinist, raconteur sublime, a writer of doggerel, a mystery writer (the Father Dowling series) and the list could go on. Of all this, I suspect the role in which he took most pride was in being a husband and a father.
Lithuanian scholar and Roman Catholic priest, Fr. Kęstutis Kevalas, is the winner of the Acton Institute’s 2010 Novak Award.
During the past nine years, Fr. Kęstutis Kevalas has initiated a new debate in Lithuania, introducing the topic of free market economics to religious believers, and presenting a new set of hitherto unknown questions to economists. Fr. Kevalas is a respected figure and well known expert on Christian social ethics, the free market, and human dignity to the people of his home country. In addition to his active work as a speaker and pastor at national events, he serves as a lecturer on moral theology at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania.
The AP reports that of the roughly $379 million spent by the US government on relief efforts in Haiti, less than 1% has been in the form of direct government to government aid.
In last night’s State of the Union address, President Obama commented that “even though banks on Wall Street are lending again, they’re mostly lending to bigger companies. Financing remains difficult for small-business owners across the country, even though they’re making a profit.”
Read more on Obama to Small Businesses: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help….
Occasional Acton Institute collaborator and theologian Eduardo Echeverria has a new book out: “Dialogue of Love”: Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic Ecumenist.
I haven’t gotten my hands on a copy yet, but the buzz—from some pretty respectable folks—is good. To wit, Francis Beckwith of Baylor University:
Children are not the property of the state:
A Christian family from Germany have been granted political asylum in the US after facing the threat of prison for home schooling their children.
This week’s Acton commentary:
The left is in trouble in Latin America. Sebastián Piñera’s recent election as Chile’s first elected center-right president in decades owes much to the inability of the center-left coalition that governed Chile after 1990 to rejuvenate itself. Yet across Latin America there is, as the Washington Post’s Jackson Diel perceptively observes, a sense that the left’s decade of dominance is unraveling.
Future historians may trace the beginning of this decline to the refusal of Honduras’s Congress, Supreme Court, Administrative Law Tribunal, independent Human Rights Ombudsman, Supreme Electoral Tribunal, two main political parties, and Catholic bishops to allow ex-President Manuel Zelaya to subvert Honduras’s constitutional order “from within” Chávista-style in 2009.
In truth, however, the populist-left is wilting because their economic policies are collapsing. The most prominent example is Venezuela. Hugo Chávez’s regime was recently forced to devalue the currency, thereby undermining the purchasing power of ordinary Venezuelans’ bolivars in an already recessionary inflation-riddled economy. He is also rationing basic commodities such as electricity. Read more on Latin America: After the Left…
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the ex-president of Haiti who has lived lavishly in exile as a guest of the South African government for the past six years, recently announced he was ready to go back and help Haiti rebuild from its catastrophic earthquake. Allowing the former despot Aristide — a long time proponent of liberation theology — back into the country would be the worst thing we could do to Haiti right now. The American government must resist any move by Aristide to return.
In 2004, I wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal in which I reminded readers of Aristide’s violent past:
In sermons later published in his book “In the Parish of the Poor,” [Aristide] called for forming “battalions” to perform “acts of deliverance” and for overthrowing the regime by “any means necessary” and pined for a Haitian version of the Sandinista Revolution. He did not hide his sincere devotion to Christian communism, which preferred its humanitarianism soaked in blood.
Ultimately, this former priest’s flawed understanding of the human person and economic realities added great suffering and injustice to a Haitian people who have endured so much: Read more on Recall Aristide to Haiti? No way….
The current issue of Touchstone magazine features an impressive cover essay by Douglas Farrow, Professor of Christian Thought at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. In “The Audacity of the State,” Farrow uses the biblical Ichabod motif to examine the crumbling pillars of the family and church, which when properly respected form critical foundations for a flourishing society.
This week’s reappointment vote for Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has created some strange bedfellows in Washington. A muddled middle of Republicans and Democrats supports the Keynesian’s reappointment, but the real odd couples are among the opposition. For different if overlapping reasons, free market proponents and far-left figures such as democratic-socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont are both convinced that Bernanke has done much to hurt our economy, particularly those in the bottom half of our economy.
Read more on Bernanke bad for limited government and the little guy…
