Ryan T. Anderson reviews John D. Mueller's Redeeming Economics: Dismal Science Redeemed: What’s Gone Wrong.

I'm puzzled by this account given by Mueller:

Thus the theory Aquinas outlined—known as “Scholastic” economics—had four key elements: the theory of production, which explains which goods (and how many of them) we produce; the theory of justice in exchange, which accounts for how we are compensated through the sale of goods for our contributing to their production; the theory of final distribution, which determines who will consume our goods; and finally, the theory of consumption (or utility), which explains which goods people prefer to consume.

I think I have the book, but if I do, it's in storage. What he writes here about distributive justice does need to be checked, since distributive justice pertains to common goods. It could be argued that whatever we produce from natural resources, which are clearly "common goods," is also common, but I haven't come across a persuasive argument that this is so.

Vocations Vid for the Eastern Province

Various popes, bishops and theologians have written about what constitutes a good regime (one that governs in accordance with the common good), and they have accepted the classification of regimes taken from the ancient Greeks. Political theorists from Aristotle to Leopold Kohr have talked about the limits to the size of a polity, and how good governance is not possible if a polity exceeds this limit. I would consider this to fall under "Natural Law reasoning" (that is to say, a precept concerning the limit to a size to a polity would be of the Natural Law, touching upon both the common good and good government). But is it something that the Church could ever endorse?

John Allen, Laicizing bishops, a movie flap, Ireland and America, and Vatican II

More often than not, people like to see their own convictions as a middle position between two extremes. We all feel better, I suppose, thinking of ourselves as rational moderates, standing against ideologues on either side.

When it comes to interpretations of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), some progressive Catholics are tempted to see Pope Benedict XVI’s “hermeneutic of reform,” which stresses continuity with the pre-Vatican II church, as the opposite end of the spectrum from more liberal views. That’s not, however, how most people in the Vatican size things up, where the “hermeneutic of reform” is instead understood as a balanced position between thinking that church history began with Vatican II, and thinking that the council was just plain wrong.

For that taxonomy to work, there have to be credible exponents of the “just plain wrong” position. That’s where Italian historian Roberto de Mattei and Monsignor Brunero Gherardini, a canon of St. Peter’s Basilica, enter the picture.

Both have published provocative books about Vatican II. Last year, de Mattei offered Il Concilio Vaticano II: Una storia mai scritta (“The Second Vatican Council: A Story Never Told”), styling Vatican II as a rupture with tradition comparable to the French Revolution, and faulting every pope since Pius X for allowing it to happen. Gherardini produced Concilio Vaticano II: Il discorso mancato (“The Second Vatican Council: The Missing Discussion”), in which he said some council fathers believed “the church was to be a kind of research laboratory rather than a dispenser of truths from on high.”

Both books were recently reviewed in L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, and in both cases the verdict was fairly negative. The commentary on de Mattei came from Italian Archbishop Agostino Marchetto, author of a study of the council openly critical of the more liberal “Bologna school” associated with Italian scholars Giuseppe Alberigo and Alberto Melloni. Marchetto wrote that de Mattei’s work is “ideological” and suffers from “extremist tendencies.” Likewise, Inos Biffi, a medieval expert and a frequent writer for L’Osservatore, charged that Gherardini doesn’t so much “discuss” Vatican II as “denigrate” it.

The dividing line is this: If the post-Vatican II period brought some confusion and excess, is that the fault of the council itself? Benedict XVI, and figures in sync with his views such as Marchetto and Biffi, say no; traditionalist critics such as de Mattei and Gherardini say yes.

All this illustrates a core insight about the Catholic Church: Deciding who the moderates are depends on the range of views one takes into consideration. When you see the whole picture, it’s often tougher to conclude that the Vatican, or the pope, represents an extreme.

Again, Allen talks about "moderates" -- this is a unhelpful term, when it comes to evaluating the second Vatican Council or its documents. I think those who are critical are critical primarily of the documents approved by the Council Fathers and of certain ambiguities. As for explaining how the documents came about, that is the job of a historian, not of a theologian or bishop, even if it is up to the theologian or bishop to interpret the documents in light of Tradition and to present them in that manner.

This is also separate from the question of whether the second Vatican Council is the cause of all the problems in the Church from the late '60s through the '70s. Again, I don't think that this is what Gherardini would claim.

The hermeneutic of continuity might be mandated by charity (and fidelity?), but does it not presuppose that the Church must reconcile the documents of the Council with tradition because of their authoritative weight? Are not syllabi and anathemas better?

op-stjoseph: St. Thomas Aquinas and the Church: Theo-Centric Ecclesiology

Peter Moskos, In Defense of Flogging

Surprised to see this published in the CoHE. The book. Publisher.

OP Vocations: Fr. Romanus Cessario OP: St. Catherine on Dominican Preaching

Who's Betraying Tradition. The Grand Dispute

The discussion is becoming heated over how to interpret the innovations of Vatican Council II, above all on freedom of religion. The traditionalists against Benedict XVI. An essay by philosopher Martin Rhonheimer in support of the pope

by Sandro Magister

Fr. Paul Murray, O.P. on contemplation

Part 1 and Part 2

TEDx: Angela Belcher: Using nature to grow batteries

faculty page
Biomolecular Materials Group
TIME

The uses and abuses of 'happiness' by William Davies (EB)

There are at least four ways in which the term ‘happiness’ can be used to augment public policy debate. No doubt these overlap in certain ways, but confusions and conflations between them are doing considerable harm to the quality of public debate in this area, which impacts upon the credibility of bodies such as Action for Happiness.

The first is philosophical, and harks back to Aristotle. A good life, Aristotle argued, is a virtuous and happy life. It is one that fulfils us as human beings, marking us out from other animals. Aristotelians are not necessarily averse to engaging in technical, economic debates, as Amartya Sen’s wonderfully expansive intellectual career has demonstrated. But nor is the ethical concept of happiness – something that surely concerns all of us – collapsible into statistical, economic or psychological questions of what is measurable or what precise actions will ‘deliver’ a pleasant chemical hit to the brain.

CUA: CUA to Host Conference on 120th Anniversary of Rerum Novarum

Philip Sutton, Same-sex attraction: science and philosophy

2011 Paschal Message of His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios of America

A Blessed Pascha to all of you!

Pope John XXII and the Franciscan ideal of absolute poverty by Melanie Brunner (via medievalists.net)

If you think community is so important, then why aren't you living in accordance with what you teach?

More thoughts on the topic of this post.

What about the scholastics? Is their witness diminished because so many of them did not labor where they came from, but were instead teaching at "international" centers of learning? They can be defended because they had been excused from family and communal duties because they had been set aside for God and His work.

I also note that it seems that the treatment of community and its origins in their political treatises and commentaries on Aristotle is short, if not "dry"short if not "dry" because the nature of communal life and how it came to be was not at issue in that day; it was simply taken for granted. Could they have imagined the various social and technological changes that have made modern atomistic living possible? As Fr. Cessario pointed out in class one time, the reason why the medievals didn't write much on the community is because they were living it. It is a more developed topic for us and the subject for so much spilled ink precisely because we don't have it.

I think it is correct to say that the teachers at the medieval universities were all clergy, secular priests or religious. When did lay masters first appear at the European universities, and when did they become a significant minority? How did they live up to their duties to family and community? What institutions were there, other than the state, for forming the laity? How much resistance was there to the centralizers of modern Europe, and was any of it found outside the nobility? Was there a lack of training among the elites in political science, or was alienation from the masses a greater factor? That is, the elites fought against centralization in order to maintain power and status, not to protect the communal life of those subordinate to them.

Stabat Mater

Dominican Liturgy: Dominican Chants of Good Friday

Wired: Gut-Bacteria Mapping Finds Three Global Varieties
NYT
Science Daily
Press release

An article from 2010.