Michael Novak has gone home to our Father in Heaven. He was a good friend, mentor. I always felt privileged to stand stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him whenever we shared a platform defending God’s plan for human economic interaction. About ten years ago he showed me a book he was working on with his daughter Janna and soon thereafter that wonderfully moving book was finished and published. In the 90s Michael encouraged me to write a regular column for his newly founded magazine Crisis which I did.
http://www.crisismagazine.com/search-results?cref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.crisismagazine.com&ie=utf-8&hl=&q=Lapin&sa=Search The process taught me more than my columns taught my readers I am sure.
Raised as a Roman Catholic, Novak believed as a young man that socialism was the ideal economic arrangement. But he began to notice a flaw: While socialism sounded good in theory, in practice it didn’t work—and non-elites fared the worst.
Capitalism had little high-minded theory, but in practice it literally provided the goods. If ordinary folks did so much better under capitalism, maybe the caricatures—e.g., that it is all based on greed—were wrong. Maybe free markets had their own virtues and were defensible, and even superior to other economic systems on moral grounds.
From this recognition sprang his most important work, “The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism,” which changed America’s public debate when it was published in 1982. “Democratic capitalism,” he wrote, is “neither the Kingdom of God nor without sin. Yet all other known systems of political economy are worse…….
https://www.wsj.com/articles/michael-novak-crafted-a-moral-defense-of-democratic-capitalism-1487948401
