More Thoughts on Disillusionment/Marx and CST

I had a post planned for today that would follow up on two distinct points in my post from yesterday. Sadly, Ruccio managed to beat me to both of them.
The first point is regarding a growing dissatisfaction with capitalism:
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC poll has found widespread dissatisfaction [...]

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What I’ve Been Reading

Creative mental forces are lacking lately. Intellectual ones, not so much. In the last two weeks I’ve read one very good book and started another.
The first, The Moral Measure of the Economy, is an excellent crash course in applied Catholic Social Teaching, written by Chuck Collins and Mary Wright. For those who are pressed for [...]

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Encyclical Word Cloud

In my previous post, I expressed skepticism about George Weigel’s spin on the emphasis on life issues in Caritas in Veritate. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ web site has a word cloud for the encyclical.

As you can see, “life,” the main framing word for these issues, certainly comes up a lot but isnot nearly [...]

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Caritas in Veritate, Commentary Roundup

For those of you who haven’t gotten enough of the new encyclical, “Caritas in Veritate,” I’d like to follow up the close-reading of the text with a roundup of some commentary from around the blogs.
Bill Easterly has a post called “The Pope, the G8, and the ‘Man in Charge’ Fallacy.” In it, he writes,
During the [...]

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Caritas in Veritate, Chapter Six and Conclusion

Note: This post is the fifth in a series of posts on Pope Benedict XVI’s “Caritas in Veritate”. Also see posts on the Intro and Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, and Chapter Five.
For those of you who have made it through this series of posts, pat yourself on the back. This will [...]

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Caritas in Veritate, Chapter Five

Note: This post is the fifth in a series of posts on Pope Benedict XVI’s “Caritas in Veritate”. Also see posts on the Intro and Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, and Chapter Six and Conclusion.

A brief  note before I begin: I’m sort of rushing (in terms of timing, not intellectually, I hope) [...]

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Caritas in Veritate, Chapter Four

Note: This post is the fourth in a series of posts on Pope Benedict XVI’s “Caritas in Veritate”. Also see posts on the Intro and Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Five, and Chapter Six and Conclusion.
In Chapter Four of Caritas in Veritate, Benedict’s primary aim is to address the issue of the environment. [...]

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Caritas in Veritate, Chapter Three

Note: This post is the third in a series of posts on Pope Benedict XVI’s “Caritas in Veritate”. Also see posts on the Intro and Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, and Chapter Six and Conclusion.
Now for a discussion of Chapter 3 of Pope Benedict XVI’s social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate. As I [...]

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Caritas in Veritate, Chapter Two

Note: This post is the second in a series of posts on Pope Benedict XVI’s “Caritas in Veritate”. Also see posts on the Intro and Chapter One, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, and Chapter Five.
The second chapter of Caritas in Veritate is “Human Development in Our Time.” In this section, Benedict offers some morally-based principles for [...]

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Caritas in Veritate, Intro and Chapter One

Note: This post is the first in a series of posts on Pope Benedict XVI’s “Caritas in Veritate”. Also see posts on the Intro and Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Four, and Chapter Five.
I’ve had a nasty habit of promising future posts on this blog and then not writing them. Well, that stops now, at [...]

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