This Is Our City

There is no science that Christians are prepared to ignore other than economics.

By all means read Catholic social teaching. The Acton Institute at acton.org is a very good source. And Paul is right. The church since has turned against the Salamancan scholars and become very anti-free market. The Popes oppose communism and free markets equally. They don't use the term, but the best expression of the Church's economics is the market socialism of Europe and the US where the government leaves as tiny a space for markets as possible. Like other socialists, the Catholic Church sees markets as a necessary evil, necessary to keep people from starving to death but not good for anything else. If you have to have an authority tell you what economics to follow, then you may be interested in the Church's social justice doctrines. If you can think for yourself and appreciate the science of economics, you'll be much more interested in the scholars of Salamanca.

Paul, you can believe whatever you want, but certain economic principles apply that are as impossible to defy as gravity. Tell yourself that you're not harming poor people all you want, but the fact is you are. Clearly you are one of those Christians, like Jim Wallis, who thinks economics is evil. That's a very medieval attitude.

Actually, I often bicycle to town; I carpool as well, and combine trips. I would suggest you read Catholic social teaching (which Roger refers to as 'the church') since Salamanca; "Catholic Social Teaching: Our Best Kept Secret" by De Berri and Hug would be good. If you accept the teaching authority of the church, it didn't stop with Salamanca. You might find E. F. Schumaker's 'Small is Beautiful' and some of Hazel Henderson's work (http://www.ethicalmarkets.tv/archives/category/words-from-hazel-henderson- past-and-present) challenging.

So Paul, by shopping at your nearby independent bookstore you are rewarding innefficiency, penalizing technology, using more resources in bricks, mortar and real estate, not to mention auto pollution and congestion, depriving yourself of selection, keeping the costs of books artificially high and waging a one man losing war with progress and innovation by tilting at windmills to forestall the inevitable. A Luddite. Myself, I use Amazon. My Christian Bookstore, Lifeway, is driven by a particular kind of narrow dispensational doctrinal agenda and even then has no selection in that niche. Or I go to Powells used bookstore, the largest used bookstore on the planet.