Conversation with Patrick Deneen About Catholic NeoCons

I’ve gone done an interview with Patrick Deneen of the political science department at Notre Dame and author of Democratic Faith.

Here’s a preview of our conversation about Catholic NeoCons:

“But I would rejoin that Catholics don’t properly think and act as Catholics if we treat these spheres as if they were autonomous and unrelated; indeed, it seems to me that basic economic arrangements that privilege individual autonomy, materialism, mobility at the expense of community, and an ‘amoral’ market significantly and inescapably contribute to our comprehensively ‘disposable society‘ (using Pope Francis’s description of, among other things, our abortion regime).  Only when we see similar energy demanding reforms of our economic system in the name not of equalization of outcome, but the telos of human flourishing, will we likely see lots of different and interesting policy ideas of how to foster a more humane economy.  But at the moment we are told that the only two options that exist are largely unregulated markets and Statism, both of which Pope Leo XIII denounced in his 1899 encyclical De Rerum Novarum and which have been rejected as false alternatives by every subsequent Pope, including Saint John Paul II and Benedict XVI.”

Get the rest here.