Media Monitoring

In a little-noticed document published last Wednesday, the Catholic bishops of England gently point to a route out of the UK's current economic and political troubles. Choosing the Common Good struggled to catch attention because it calls for a renewal of British moral culture on the basis of two ancient but time-worn principles: the common good and civic virtue. Just a few days before the Catholic bishops issued their 10-page summary of Catholic social teaching, Harvard's fashionable Professor Michael Sandel was in London's East End in a workshop with London Citizens, applauding our efforts to secure a living wage, a cap on interest rates and safer streets.

 

Virtue and the common good are two ideas Sandel is eager to revive. He has led the challenge in recent years to the myth that we enter the public square as unfettered individuals, shorn of other loyalties; and to the lie that the state is neutral in moral matters.

 

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