God & Money: The Moral Challenge of Capitalism

by Charles McDaniel

Overview

God & Money confronts the current dominant right wing Republican / evangelical Christian view that unfettered, market-driven capitalism and Christian faith and values are compatible. Drawing on such ethical luminaries as Reinhold Niebuhr, G.K. Chesterton, Peter Berger, and John Paul II, author Charles McDaniel shows that to reverse the current decline in public morality, capitalism must be balanced by enduring religious and moral values.

Challenging the captivity of Christian culture by free market, global capitalism, McDaniel joins other Christian ethical visionaries in advocating a "redemptive economy," one that champions individual human dignity, true community, and the moral regeneration of cultural traditions in vital dialectic with the inevitable market capitalism of the contemporary world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780742552227
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	12/01/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.36(w) x 9.37(h) x 1.02(d)

About the Author

Charles McDaniel, a successful business entrepreneur, now focuses on the interplay of economics, religion, and values. He is visiting professor of Church-State Relations at Baylor University. He lives in Waco, Texas.

Table of Contents

Part 1 Part I: The Economic Threat to Christian Morality Chapter 2 Introduction Chapter 3 The Less Divided Economic Mind of American Christianity Chapter 4 The Austrian Foundations of Economic Conservatism Chapter 5 Hayek's Moral System and the Threat to Christian Tradition Chapter 6 A Question of Moral Sustainability Part 7 Part II: Envisioning a Morally Redemptive Economy Chapter 8 Reinhold Niebuhr's Economic Realism Chapter 9 G.K. Chesterton's Distributism Chapter 10 John Paul II's Economic Personalism Chapter 11 Conclusion Chapter 12 Bibliography Chapter 13 Index

Editorial Reviews

God & Money is a strikingly original, subtly nuanced and learned book. It insists that, while there is no 'Christian' economics as such, it is both possible and necessary to bring virtue, morality and compassion to economic life. In the tradition of Max Weber and Daniel Bell, McDaniel suggests that capitalism—unless social compensations are in place—can tend to erode the moral bases which elevate the status of human persons, so they do not become commodities. This important book will be an indispensable study for social ethicists, students of neo-conservatism and those who are concerned about the moral bases of economic life.

John A. Coleman

Charles McDaniel's God and Money makes an invaluable contribution to the discussion of theology and economics. He persuasively demonstrates the moral and theological mistakes attending the neoconservative rapprochement with the Austrian school. Then he carefully develops the theological economics of Niebuhr, Chesterton and John Paul II showing how their work points in the direction of a 'morally redemptive economy,' which is as concerned with the good as with value. This is a temperate, carefully argued work that should be discussed by all those working in the intersection of theology and economics.

Steve Long

Given the current political alignments in America, it is easy to assume that conservative Christianity and laissez-faire capitalism make for cozy bedfellows. McDaniel (church-state studies, Baylor Univ.) attempts to undermine this assumption in a two-stage argument. In Part 1, he provides an extended historical and philosophical critique of the neoconservative movement, concluding that it is unduly influenced by the thoroughly secular economic theories of Friedrich Hayek and blind to the deleterious spiritual effects of capitalism. In Part 2, he offers a positive alternative in his sympathetic portrayal of the thought of three orthodox Christians who avoided the horns of the capitalist/collectivist dilemma: Reinhold Niebuhr, G.K. Chesterton, and Pope John Paul II. McDaniel's warning that capitalism poses "moral challenges" such as consumerism and instant gratification may be well founded, but it is not especially revelatory, and one wonders whether appealing to the example of two Roman Catholics and a mainline Lutheran will do much to change the thinking of those evangelicals who make up so much of the Christian Right. Optional for academic libraries.
—Charles Seymour Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

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