Moderator’s Opening Remarks
This type of discussion is relatively rare in Christian circles, precisely because it is a difficult one. Though the roots of modern economics lie, intellectually speaking, in the thought of Aristotle, medieval philosophers, and the sixteenth-century Spanish Scholastics, there is little doubt that the dominant philosophical and anthropological influences on most modern economic thought have been generally positivistic in nature. Even today, there are many economists who are relatively uninformed of the ultimate roots of their discipline, and who have never questioned the moral-anthropological assumptions that underlie much of their work. Samuel Gregg et al, "Proceedings of the Interdisciplinary Congress for the Development of Economic Personalism August 9-12, 2001 Grand Rapids, Michigan," Journal of Markets and Morality 4, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 289-355