In Fall of 2018, I remember attending a talk at Georgetown, given as part of a conference put on by the Thomistic Institute. One of the talks given concerned the Holy Father Emeritus' resignation and what that meant for the Church writ large. Quite distinctly, I remember hearing the compelling argument that just as Pope Benedict XVI had served the Church via his Petrine ministry, perhaps his turn to a more cloistered and contemplative life too was a model for the Church to weather what was to come.

To restore an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity- Our Mission, American Compass American Compass is one of those think tanks that has excited a number of my friends. In particular, for those of my friends who have become market-skeptic but remain on the right, this think tank holds a certain promise. It holds the promise, one might argue, of providing a reasonable excuse of making the tough choices that don’t align with the market consensus.

I’m going to tell a story, and you can decide if it in any way sounds familiar to you. There is a group of people living in a society without nobility, so this society decides that they’re going to focus a lot on formal credentials. These specific people are part of a cultural minority, and they know this. As a result of this, they realize that they lack any real chance of being the majority in the most elite universities that grant the most prestigious credentials.

The proper exercise of personal freedom requires specific conditions of an economic, social, juridic, political and cultural order that “are too often disregarded or violated. Such situations of blindness and injustice injure the moral life and involve the strong as well as the weak in the temptation to sin against charity. By deviating from the moral law man violates his own freedom, becomes imprisoned within himself, disrupts neighbourly fellowship and rebels against divine truth.

The Church’s social doctrine is not a “third way” between liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism, nor even a possible alternative to other solutions less radically opposed to one another: rather, it constitutes a category of its own. Nor is it an ideology, but rather the accurate formulation of the results of a careful reflection on the complex realities of human existence, in society and in the international order, in the light of faith and of the Church’s tradition.

I’ve often thought about doing a reivew of textbooks as I’ve come across them, and looking back on the first year, I think that now is an opportune time to actually think about the books I’ve read for my classes or research. This is an ongoing list, purely opinionated, and entirely meant as a catharsis of all the content that is covered in a PhD program, especially in the required first year sequence.

In many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine, and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness. - Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger As a criticism of Catholic Socialism, Horn and Pakulak (H&P) offer a thoroughly mediocre rebuttal. As a defense of capitalism as an economic system, H&P offer an underwhelming picture. On the other hand, as an exemplar of current Republican polemics, H&P give it to us, par excellence, with several chapters feeling as if they could have been lifted straight from a Glenn Beck book from when he still had a program on Fox News.