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The world is entering yet another age of economics. Virtually all the major problems which preoccupy governments are economic problems — problems of growth and limits, food and fuel, employment and inflation, productivity and expanding populations, development and justice. The official documents of the churches since Rerum Novarum (1891) seem more and more preoccupied with economics. Yet there is hardly a less developed area in the tradition of Christian thought, whether in philosophy or in theology, than the relation of Christianity to economics.

While religion has a substantial influence on economic affairs & political economy, few theologians have attempted to reflect systematically on democratic capitalism, & specifically on the corporation, its key institution. The corporation is a communal structure based on a pattern traceable to medieval guilds & monasteries. Corporate structures in business & elsewhere mediate between the individual & the state. Religious misunderstandings of the corporation derive from the ideological use of "poverty," the world view of traditional societies, naivete about transfer payments, the anticapitalist bias of intellectuals, guilt-mongering, & the temptation to seek power for churches through alliances with state authorities. Crucial concepts for a theology of economics include order, emergent probability, sin, practical wisdom, the individual, community, distribution, & scarcity. Christians & Jews have reason to value the corporation because societies with democratic capitalist institutions are the only ones able to meet their own basic needs & the only ones with genuinely democratic institutions. W. H. Stoddard.

What is the American system like? To our dismay we search in vain for one reliable book, or even one set of books, that describes the system within which we are now living, under whose workings we freely write and freely meet in public. (In most systems on earth scholars may not and do not work as we do.) There is no one book to place in the hands of a foreign friend and say: "Here is an accurate description of the way our nation works." There is no one book to place in the hands of a graduate student—a student disaffected, perhaps, from "the system." We have no Manifesto. We have no current Tocqueville. We lack a text that expresses our operative ideals and catches the meaning of our practices.

Socialism, it appears, is like the Volvo: the thinking person's ideology. It is, according to Irving Howe in World of Our Fathers, the vital inheritance of Jewish immigrants. It attracts many dissidents of Catholic origin, like Michael Harrington, Garry Wills, Rosemary Ruether, and the busy workers at the Center for Concern. According to Henry Ford II, it has come to dominate in the bosom of the Ford Foundation. On television shows corporate tycoons and small businessmen are invariably corrupt, and on the television news—that lucrative portion of one of the most profitable of all industries—profits in other industries are reported on with faint whiffs of moral disapproval.

During those ominous early hours and indecisive days of the war of Yom Kippur, many American Jews were surprised by the depth of their fears concerning the fate of Israel. Such Jews had thought of themselves as powerful, detached, integrated into the larger American society. Suddenly they could not be certain that their colleagues and friends shared the secret dread they began to feel: the nightmare of another possible holocaust.Christian leaders have sometimes seemed to treat Israel as though it presented an anguishing moral problem: "The question has two sides. There are complexities. Jewish military spirit seems a trifle pushy. Think of the poor, Third-World Arab refugees." One anguishes about sorting out the truly moral thing to do.

A remarkable number of Christian theologians are, perhaps surprisingly, praising B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity. A number of others believe his work incompatible with Christianity. Both may be wrong.Professor Skinner would be the last person to claim autonomous credit for Beyond Freedom and Dignity. It was not he, it was the environment that controlled the book's coming into being. And if we suppose that Skinner is a latter-day Thomas Aquinas, we might well imagine on his lips the echoes of an ancient outlook: "It was not owing to anything in me; everything was gift. Yet, I set hand to paper, but only through God's grace sweetly disposing all things…." We recall the countless unsigned medieval masterpieces, the anonymous achievements of Chartres and that now lost social and cultural sense which did not attach much significance to which individual it was who expressed best the artistic genius of the age. It was enough, in those days, that the people, the culture, flowered. So imagining, so remembering, we recover more fully the shock of the sudden birth of ego: the Eenaissance, the Enlightenment and the Age of the Individual.

He was," Professor Donald Williams of Harvard once said, "the most gentle philosopher I ever met." Professor Williams had no great use for theism. We may be certain it was not the theories of Jacques Maritain, rather his person, that touched him. Maritain would have understood such praise. Theories are not the only carriers of truth. Persons carry truth too.The omnia opera of St Thomas Aquinas Maritain almost uniquely understood convey a nonrationahstic view of human intelligence For Aquinas intelligence operates in many modes with unfitting suppleness adaptability and wordlessness Intelligence exceeds logic Intelligence exceeds words Yet intelligence does not despise its own weak instruments—its poor words, its structures of logic, its painstaking formulation of reasons.