Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Virtue

August 27, 2013

The Blessed Business of Beer

A recent story from Catholic News Service highlights an interesting encounter between markets and monasticism, a subject that I have commented on before, this time centered around the Monastery of St. Continue Reading...
August 22, 2013

Prudent Stewardship and the Cappadocian Fathers

Today at Ethika Politika, I examine a few rules of prudent stewardship that follow from the teachings of the Cappadocian fathers on poverty, almsgiving, and fasting. One of the great challenges in this area today is how best to live out in our present context the statement of St. Continue Reading...
August 16, 2013

Virtuous Bribery? Care for Prisoners in the Early Church

In her historical study of wealth and poverty in the early Church, Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich, Helen Rhee offers the following interesting historical tidbit with regards to how early Christians were able to minister to their imprisoned brothers and sisters who awaited martyrdom: Bribing the prison guards, which must have cost a certain amount, features frequently enough in the Christian texts. Continue Reading...
August 16, 2013

Private Virtue and Public Speech

Sometimes we are not aware of the foolishness of our private speech until our words go public. This is one of the morals of the story of Philadelphia Eagle’s receiver Riley Cooper’s n-word slip. Continue Reading...
August 07, 2013

Dispersing Poor People And Crime

Emily Badger at The Atlantic Wire posts a common sense story regarding the debate about whether or not the dispersing of poor people out of inner-city housing projects into suburban neighborhoods, through government housing voucher programs, increases crime rates. Continue Reading...
July 16, 2013

Smart Drugs: When Performance Rules

When a culture values individualism as a virtue, it sends a message to young people that what really matters in life is your performance. To make matters worse, this performance pressure is coupled with the idea that unless you are on top, you just don’t matter. Continue Reading...
July 05, 2013

Praying For Human Flourishing and Human Suffering

One of the consistent themes in Christian social teaching is the recognition that this world has both material and spiritual realities. As such, it is not only important that we think about the moral, political, and economic structures that contribute to set the stage for human flourishing but that we also pray for those who are suffering that they would be free to live out their callings as human persons made in God’s image. Continue Reading...