According to legal historian Harold Berman, modern law is based on three elements that come from medieval roots: 1. The discovery of the legal writings compiled under the Roman Emperor Justinian and other Roman codes served as the foundation upon which to build a legal system. It provided the basic legal vocabulary. 2. The scholastic … Read more
For me it was a nightmare. It all happened so quickly. Before I knew it, I lost my job. The manager did not even have the courage to face me. He sent me a text message informing me of the decision and even added the indignity of putting a smiley face figure at the message’s … Read more
One harsh consequence of our technological society is a mania for speed and novelty. Most early inventions of the Industrial Revolution, whether train, steam ship, or telegraph, celebrated speed more than any other aspect. These new technological advances helped unleash pent-up disordered passions deep inside man that exploded like fireworks and found their expression in … Read more
Written by Linda Radke. CHANDLER, AZ (March 2014) – Return to Order: From a Frenzied Economy to an Organic Christian Society —Where We’ve Been, How We Got Here, and Where We Need to Go by John Horvat II has earned Honorable Mentions in the general-nonfiction categories at the 2014 Los Angeles Book Festival, 2014 Great … Read more
One of the problems with the program Common Core is that it places little emphasis to the body of Western literature that has endured over the ages. Rather, it favors what it calls “informational” texts that contain neither moral judgments nor beauty. The great conservative writer Russel Kirk summarizes well why a literary tradition is … Read more
At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on March 6-8, members of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) promoted the award-winning book, Return to Order: From a Frenzied Economy to Organic Christian Society—Where We’ve Been, How We Got There and Where We Need to Go by John Horvat II. … Read more
I received an interesting email from an Australian reader regarding my book, Return to Order. She correctly notes that the book deals with many errors that America has helped spread throughout the modern world. One of these is the spirit of frenetic intemperance which is criticized in the book as a source of economic unbalance. … Read more
In dealing with today’s economic problems, it should be remembered that the plague of mass unemployment is a modern phenomenon. At the height of Christian civilization during the Middle Ages, unemployment was rare for reasons that were social rather than economic. Economist Joseph Schumpeter notes that, in principle, medieval society provided for all its members. … Read more
The desire of material goods has limits but the desire for money is different. Saint Thomas Aquinas in his admirable logic explains that material goods, represented in the concrete form of food, clothing, houses, land or other products, all have definite limits based on production and consumption. The very nature of these commodities is also … Read more
No method of payment changed the buying habits of Americans more than that of the installment plan. The idea of making regular payments as one uses the product caught the imagination of the nation in the early twentieth century. Starting with sewing machines, farm machinery and automobiles, the practice soon embraced almost every line of … Read more
