Acton Institute Director of Research and author of Tea Party Catholic Samuel Gregg joined host John Pinhiero for a discussion of his latest book and the Catholic influence on the American founding on Faith and Reason, Pinhiero’s new show on Holy Family Radio in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo, Michigan. The wide-ranging discussion lasted a full broadcast hour, and can be heard using the audio player below.
“With every passing year, and each new EU bailout, Europeans seem to be forgetting where they came from,” writes journalist David Aikman in a new review of Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Future. In The Weekly Standard, Aikman commends Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg’s book for showing how the long post-war project designed to advance European integration, economic security and social welfare has in fact degenerated into government dependency and bureaucratic bloat. The former Time magazine senior correspondent and bestselling author also applauds Gregg for reminding us that Marxist inspired “redistributionism” is really the core problem. Excerpt from the review:
The idea of a European federal superstate as an economic and political entity was never far from the minds of Europe’s key founders. Democratic capitalism was to be the main economic engine of that entity. But as Samuel Gregg points out in this cogently argued study—which frequently refers to Alexis de Tocqueville—whereas the American federal experiment emphasized economic and political freedom as the prerequisites for social prosperity and “human flourishing,” Europe’s postwar program was heavily influenced by social democracy. The goal became economic security for everyone, an idea that required labor-union political power and large bureaucracies to administer the welfare state.
Gregg correctly reminds us that behind social democracy’s stress on fair economic outcomes for Europe’s population lay the fundamental Marxist principle of redistributionism. He certainly does not attribute the European Union’s recent woes to the influence of Marxism, but he assembles a variety of ingredients that add up to what he calls “social Europe,” a social-welfare coterie of EU countries in which general prosperity has declined as economic freedoms have been whittled down. (more…)
Last week, an exciting new organization called the Transatlantic Christian Council (TCC) hosted its inaugural conference. The theme of the conference was “Sustaining Freedom”, which aligns well with the Council’s mission “to develop a transatlantic public policy network of European and North American Christians and conservatives in order to promote the civic good, as understood within the Judeo-Christian tradition on which our societies are largely based.”
What I find most exciting about this Council, for which I commend Todd Huizinga and Henk Jan van Schothorst on their vision and initiative in founding, is this: like the Acton Institute, the TCC is not exclusively devoted to just one aspect of life, but rather aims to provide a forum for conversation on a broad range of life’s many important and fundamental human questions.
The starting point for these conversations is with a basic concept of human dignity. This concept is rooted in an openness to the idea of man as an image of God — endowed with the capacities for willfulness and reason, a creature and a sub-creator. And it is this understanding of the human person that serves as a point of departure for working through all sorts of interesting questions of politics, economics, liberty, government, religion, and family.
When I mentioned to a friend that I would be travelling to Belgium for this conference, he said to me: “Be sure they don’t euthanize you and harvest your organs!”
“Well,” I thought to myself, “that’s certainly a novel way to wish someone a good trip.”
Giovanni Patriarca recently sat down with Acton Research director, Samuel Gregg, to discuss his latest book, Tea Party Catholic. Patriarca, Acton’s 2012 Novak Award winner, began by asking Gregg what the “most alarming and peculiar aspects” are of America losing its “historical memory” and running the “risk of deconstruction of its own identity.”
The American Founding was certainly influenced by certain streams of Enlightenment thought, not all of which (such as social contract theory) are compatible with Catholic faith. Yet as figures ranging from Alexis de Tocqueville to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI have observed, the same Founding was also shaped by a broadly Christian (mainly Protestant) culture and various versions of natural law thinking with which it is possible for Catholicism to converse. Was the American Founding perfect? Of course not! It was as much a creation of fallible human beings as any other political society. But as both Tocqueville and Benedict observed, the American Experiment has provided ways of reconciling, among other things, religious faith and liberty in a manner that many European countries simply failed – and in some cases – still fail to do. If, however, Americans lose sight of this inheritance of ideas and institutions, it is hard to see how the American Experiment, which represents a distillation of the broader tradition of what I unapologetically call the civilization of the West, can survive. (more…)
Continuing our roundup of Acton comment on Evangelii Gaudium, here’s Acton’s Director of Research and Author of Tea Party Catholic Samuel Gregg joining host Al Kresta on Ave Maria Radio’s Kresta in the Afternoon to discuss Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation, with particular emphasis on its economic elements. This interview took place on Monday, December 2nd.
Good Monday morning to you! Acton’s Director of Research (and author of Tea Party Catholic) Samuel Gregg was called upon to provide analysis of ‘Evangelii Gaudium‘ on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America radio show. You can listen to the interview using the audio player below:
I also want to draw attention to the interviews conducted over the weekend with Acton President Rev. Robert A. Sirico that we posted on Saturday, just in case anyone is checking in after the long weekend and missed them. And of course don’t forget to check out Rev. Sirico’s video comments on ‘Evangelii Gaudium’ from last Wednesday if you haven’t had an opportunity to do so already.
George J Marlin, Catholic author and editor, recently reviewed Samuel Gregg’s latest book, Tea Party Catholic at The Catholic Thing. He begins by saying that he knows many members of the Tea Party who are religious, but “because they do not have a consistent public philosophy that serves as the foundation of their civic activism,” they tend to “go off half-cocked and in different directions.” However, he is confident that Tea Party Catholic will “help fill this void:”
Gregg, an heir to the Michael Novak school of democratic capitalism, believes that Catholic economic and social thought has made an important contribution to “the shaping and uplifting of American life and culture.” He further argues that the Church’s “robust commitment to religious liberty. . .is quite applicable to the development of a morally ‘thick’ case for free economy and limiting the government’s economic role.”
Tea Party Catholic spells out the Catholic vision for personal and economic liberty and how “prudential application of the principles of Catholic social teaching can help alleviate the needs of the materially least among us” and help people flourish in society. (more…)