Houston’s culture of rugged communitarianism

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On man vs. robots, don’t trust the economic models

Given the breakneck pace of improvements in automation and artificial intelligence, fears about job loss are taking more space in the cultural imagination. Symbolized by President Obama’s famous laments about ATM machines and the more recent concerns about Amazon’s “job-killing” grocery-store roboclerks, the anxiety is palpable and persistent. Continue Reading...

Hurricanes as schools of charity

The only force greater than the destruction wrought by this summer’s hellish hurricanes is the solidarity written indelibly upon the human heart. The acts of charity they galvanize show the power of voluntary efforts springing from voluntarism, virtue, and compassion. Continue Reading...

Samuel Gregg: ‘First Things,’ R.R. Reno, and the market economy

The role of free market economics in the West should not be off-limits for debate among religious conservatives. As Samuel Gregg writes in a new essay, that standard should “provide philosophical and theological guidance about how to ground free economies—and liberal institutions more generally—upon more solid foundations than the peculiar mixes of utilitarianism, autonomy-for-autonomy’s sake, and pseudo-evolutionary theory advocated by some liberal thinkers.” Continue Reading...