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George Weigel: St. John Paul II on the Free and Virtuous Society

Democracy, the Market, and Culture

Date of Lecture: February 21, 2017

George WeigelAbout the Speaker: George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow and William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of the best-selling biography of Pope John Paul II, "Witness to Hope" (Harper, 1999), and the author or editor of 20 other books, including "The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy" (Doubleday, 2010); "Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church" (Basic, 2013); "Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches" (Basic, 2013) and "City of Saints: A Pilgrimage to John Paul II’s Kraków" (Image, 2015).

About the Talk: Weigel discussed the social teachings contained in various papal encyclicals that connected culture, economics and politics over the last century. Pope John Paul II, for example, redefined "work" as an expression of human creativity, and "poverty" as exclusion from the social and cultural networks where wealth is created. He believed freedom must be tethered to moral truth.

His talk is one of the Deitchman Family Lectures on Religion and Modernity and co-sponsored with the Department of Political Science's Charles Carroll Program.

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