Michael Novak – författare

This book is about the family lives of some 10,000 children and adults who live in an all-Negro public housing project in St Louis. The Pruitt-Igoe project is only one of the many environments in which urban Negro Americans lived in the 1960s, but the character of the family life there shares much with the family life of lower-class Negroes as it has been described by other investigators in other cities and at other times, in Harlem, Chicago, New Orleans, or Washington D.C. This book is primarily concerned with private life as it is lived from day to day in a federally built and supported slum. The questions, which are treated here, have to do with the kinds of interpersonal relationships that develop in nuclear families, the socialization processes that operate in families as children grow up in a slum environment, the informal relationships of children and adolescents and adults with each other, and, finally, the world views (the existential framework) arising from the life experiences of the Pruitt-Igoeans and the ways they make use of this framework to order their experiences and make sense out of them. The lives of these persons are examined in terms of life cycles. Each child there is born into a constricted world, the world of lower class, Negro existence, and as he grows he is shaped and directed by that existence through the day-to-day experiences and relationships available to him. The crucial transition from child of a family; to progenitor of a new family begins in adolescence, and for this reason the book pays particular attention to how each new generation of parents expresses the cultural and social structural forces that formed it and continue to constrain its behavior. This book, in short, is about intimate personal life in a particular ghetto setting. It does not analyze the larger institutional, social structural, and ideological forces that provide the social, economic, and political context in which lower-class Negro life is lived. These larger macro sociological forces are treated in another volume based on research in the Pruitt-Igoe community. However, this book does draw on the large body of literature on the structural position of Negroes in American society as background for its analysis of Pruitt-Igoe private life.

In Washington's God Michael Novak-one of America's leading neoconservative pundits-and his daughter, Jana, uncover George Washington's religious life. Finally the record is set straight on the most thoroughly misunderstood aspect of Washington's life. The Novaks focus on Washington's strong trust in divine Providence and see this belief as providing the unifying narrative to his monumental life.

The monumental Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups is the most authoritative single source available on the history, culture, and distinctive characteristics of ethnic groups in the United States. The Dimensions of Ethnicity series is designed to make this landmark scholarship available to everyone in a series of handy paperbound student editions. Selections in this series will include outstanding articles that illuminate the social dynamics of a pluralistic nation or masterfully summarize the experience of key groups. Written by the best-qualified scholars in each field, Dimensions of Ethnicity titles will reflect the complex interplay between assimilation and pluralism that is a central theme of the American experience.The tightening and loosening of ethnic identity under changing definitions of “Americanism” is emphasized in this volume.

A Free Society Reader rises to the challenge of freedom in the twenty-first century, offering thoughts and insights with significant implications for citizens of today's brand new world. Our era's most prominent figures in the fields of Christianity and liberty speak about Pope John Paul II's vision of a free society, conceptualize Christianity and political economy, debate issues of democracy and the free society, and question the role of culture. Together for the first time in one volume, these preeminent thinkers provide inspiration and insight to scholars, students, and general readers charting the enormous changes the new millennium has seen.

Michael Novak's eyewitness report on the second and pivotal session of Vatican II in 1964 vividly inter weaves pageantry, politics, and theology. An unusually well-informed lay intellectual, who had earned a theological degree just before the Council, Novak applauded the purposes of Pope John XXIII and his successor Paul VI-"to throw open the windows of the church." In this report, he coined the classic description of the foes of the reforms at Vatican II as the party of "nonhistorical orthodoxy," emphasizing the eternal and unchanging, neglecting history and contingency.The author recounts many moments of high drama-Pope Paul VI's opening speech, the vote on the collegiality of bishops, the plea of Cardinal Bea on behalf of the chapter on Jews, and Bishop De Smedt's defense of religious freedom. His colorful chapter on the American bishops in 1964 serves as a fascinating benchmark, as do his many insights into the new role of the laity. His final chapter is a moving tribute to the Open Church engaging the contemporary world, and his new introduction brings this report up to date.This work will be of compelling interest to those interested in the post-conciliar fall of Communism, under the great John Paul II-who took his name from his two predecessors at Vatican II.The winner of the million-dollar Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion (1994), Michael Novak is a theologian, author, and former U.S. ambassador. He currently holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. where he is director of social and political studies. His writings have appeared in every major Western language, and in Chinese, Bengali, Korean, and Japanese. Also available from Transaction are his Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions, The Experience of Nothingness, The Guns of Lattimer, Unmeltable Ethnics, Belief and Unbelief, and Choosing Presidents.

A response to the Catholic Bishops' Pastoral on the U.S. economy, this book presents a lay point of view on Catholic social thought and the economy.

Writing as a philosopher, not as a social scientist, the author takes a radically different approach to the study of criminality, asking not 'what are the causes of crime?' but 'what are the causes of virtue?' Novak concentrates on what builds character and why there is a serious lack of character in our culture and society today.

...a major work for our times. —Irving Kristol, The Public Interest

Michael Novak's work is challenging. We often disagree sharply in out interpretations and assessments of liberation theology, but he raises important issues which call for clarification and response.

This book examines capitalism and socialism and how religion and theology are incorporated into their definitions.

This book discusses the future of Latin America's economic prospects.

This book examines the Soviet Union and the gradual process of liberalization in its press and government.

As nations undergo radical transformation in every quarter of the world, we have a greater need than ever before to re-examine the sources of strength and weakness in our political, social and economic institutions. This book explores fundamental questions of wealth and poverty, of freedom and responsibility, and traces our ideas about them to their sources in Aristotle, Aquinas, and the Judeo-Christian tradition. Novak shows how an understanding of these sources can liberate human potential for creativity, reinvigorate our institutions and lay the foundations for economic progress. Special attention is given to the roots of Latin America's problems of debt, capital flight, and poverty in its religious and philosophical outlook.

This book reviews the long history of the corporation and examines the central role of business and economic growth in the strengthening of civil society and democracy.

This book discusses the moral and practical foundations of the corporation and corporate governance.

Two achievementsup the poor and animating civil societyare powerful moral claims for business corporations but schemes for corporate governance jeopardize these achievements.

Many Americans today consider the corporation to be the number one public enemy. Downsizing, corporate greed, an exclusive focus on the needs of shareholders at the expense of workers—the list of complaints from the left and right is long and growing. In this penetrating and insightful book, Michael Novak, regarded by some as America's foremost social thinker, and author of such internationally acclaimed bestsellers as The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism and Business as a Calling, argues that these critics ask the corporation to be something it is not, and they overlook the functions that it performs best—the cultivation of civil society, the fortification of democracy, and the elevation of the poor. Borrowing a phrase from Abraham Lincoln, Novak shows how the corporation weds "the fire of invention" to the "fuel of interest" to generate a creative, dynamic, and civic-minded citizenry. The Fire of Invention examines and illuminates many crucial debates: What is the purpose of the corporation? How should a corporation be governed? How much corporate independence from government regulation is desirable? How can businesses prepare for the complex economic and ethical challenges of the next century? This important book will fundamentally change the way Americans think about big business.

Few writers have covered the intellectual terrain traversed by Michael Novak, who has written on theology, philosophy, political economy, and business theory. This book brings together many of Novak's crucial essays on "moral ecology": the ethos that must be cultivated and preserved if liberal democratic societies are to survive. Novak argues in defense of the free and virtuous society by examining the family, welfare reform, free markets, self-government, and the American founding. A series of remarkable intellectual studies on figures such as Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas, and John Courtney Murray, along with an autobiographical essay by Novak and an introduction by Brian C. Anderson, complete On Cultivating Liberty, an indispensable book for anyone concerned about the future of the democratic project as we enter the third millennium.

In this classic work, the foremost historian of science in our time, George Sarton, sums up his reflections on the role of science and of the humanities in our culture. Voicing his opposition to the old-fashioned humanists on the one hand, and to the 'uneducated' men of science and technicians on the other, Sarton points out to the former that the humanities without scientific are essentially incomplete. He warns the latter that without history, without philosophy, without arts and letters, without a living religion, human life on this planet would cease to be worthwhile.After outlining his 'Faith of a Humanist' in the opening section, Sarton goes on to analyze 'The History of Science and the History of Civilization,' to discuss the progress of scientific thought since ancient times in 'East and West,' and to propose the solution for the educational and cultural crisis of our time in 'The New Humanism' and in 'The History of Science and the Problems of Today.' He concludes not only that science is a source of technological development that has changed the face of the earth and has convulsed our lives for good and evil, but that it nonetheless affords the best means of understanding the world, its people, and the multitude of their relationships. 'Science is the conscience of mankind.'Included in this edition is Robert M. Merton's address before the Sarton Centennial meeting of November 1984. It is a stunning tour de force in its own right, providing insights into Sarton, teaching and research at Harvard in the 1930s, and the personal interaction between Sarton the mentor, and Merton the pupil. The essay supplements May Sarton's earlier 'Informal Portrait of George Sarton.'

An inquiry into the nature of human rights, the relationship of the issue of human rights to policy making and strategic thinking, and the effect of the human rights issue on the conflict between the Soviet Union and the Western liberal democracies. Michael Novak begins by boldly stating five theses of human rights. He proceeds to clarify what he means by human rights in the Judeo-Christian tradition that underlies Western political thought and concludes with a variety of policy recommendations.

Written by noted Catholic philosopher Michael Novak, the selections in The Myth of Romantic Love and Other Essays highlight the arc of his intellectual career. Collectively demonstrating the fundamental unity of Novak's work, the sixteen essays in this book span a broad range of political, economic, and social topics.The selections offer clarity of thinking for the sake of concrete ends. For example, "The Myth of Romantic Love," the chapter from which the title of this work is drawn, sharply distinguishes the "love" that popular culture portrays from the true Christian vision of love. And "The Family out of Favor" argues, "if things go well with the family, life is worth living; when the family falters, life falls apart." Thus, true Christian love manifest in marriage and family life is a greater resource for civilized society than any other institution.Although this collection shows that Novak's viewpoints did evolve over time, he remains a thinker that is clearly rooted in the ancient and medieval Catholic tradition. From his discussions of gender relations, to economics, culture, and politics, his perspective honors the primacy of man and his immediate experience, and thereby ultimately glorifies the Creator. Novak's writing will infuriate some readers, and inspire many others but both comrades-in-arms and intellectual opponents will find the clarity and intensity of his writings undeniable.

This book is about the family lives of some 10,000 children and adults who live in an all-Negro public housing project in St Louis. The Pruitt-Igoe project is only one of the many environments in which urban Negro Americans lived in the 1960s, but the character of the family life there shares much with the family life of lower-class Negroes as it has been described by other investigators in other cities and at other times, in Harlem, Chicago, New Orleans, or Washington D.C. This book is primarily concerned with private life as it is lived from day to day in a federally built and supported slum. The questions, which are treated here, have to do with the kinds of interpersonal relationships that develop in nuclear families, the socialization processes that operate in families as children grow up in a slum environment, the informal relationships of children and adolescents and adults with each other, and, finally, the world views (the existential framework) arising from the life experiences of the Pruitt-Igoeans and the ways they make use of this framework to order their experiences and make sense out of them. The lives of these persons are examined in terms of life cycles. Each child there is born into a constricted world, the world of lower class, Negro existence, and as he grows he is shaped and directed by that existence through the day-to-day experiences and relationships available to him. The crucial transition from child of a family; to progenitor of a new family begins in adolescence, and for this reason the book pays particular attention to how each new generation of parents expresses the cultural and social structural forces that formed it and continue to constrain its behavior. This book, in short, is about intimate personal life in a particular ghetto setting. It does not analyze the larger institutional, social structural, and ideological forces that provide the social, economic, and political context in which lower-class Negro life is lived. These larger macro sociological forces are treated in another volume based on research in the Pruitt-Igoe community. However, this book does draw on the large body of literature on the structural position of Negroes in American society as background for its analysis of Pruitt-Igoe private life.

This is perhaps the most widely read of Michael Novak's books. Belief and Unbelief attempts to push intelligence and articulation as far as possible into the stuff of what so many philosophers set aside as subjectivity. It is an impassioned critique of the idea of an unbridgeable gap between the emotive and the cognitive � and in its own way, represents a major thrust at positivist analysis.Written in a context of personal tragedy as well as intellectual search, the book is grounded in the belief that human experience is enclosed within a person to person relationship with the source of all things � sometimes in darkness, other tunes in aridity, but always in deep encounter with community and courage. It is written with a deep fidelity to classical Catholic thought as well as a sense of the writings of sociology, anthropology, and political theory�from Harold Lasswell to Friedrich von Hayek.This third edition includes Novak's brilliant 1961 article "God in the Colleges" from Harper's � a critique of the technification of university life that rules issues of love, death, and personal destiny out of bounds, and hence leaves aside the mysteries of contingency and risk, in favor of the certainties of research, production, and consumption. For such a "lost generation" Belief and Unbelief will remain of tremendous interest and impact.When the book first appeared thirty years ago, it was praised by naturalists and religious thinkers alike. Sidney Hook called it "a remarkable book, written with verve and distinction." James Collins termed it "a lively and valuable essay from which a reflective, religiously concerned reader can draw immense profit." And The Washington Post reviewer claimed that "Novak has written a rich, relentlessly honest introduction to the problem of belief. It is a deeply personal book, rigorous in argument and open ended in conclusions."