The new issue of Econ Journal Watch is out and EJW has teamed up with the Acton Institute to feature ‘religion and economics’ as the topic for a symposium.

As some of you may know, my fellow Editor-in-Chief Fred Foldvary is an editor for the journal, and Warren is the math reader, so this project holds a special place here at NOL. I just wish they’d be a little less humble about their endeavors elsewhere and share this type of stuff themselves (this humility is a recurring problem in the libertarian quadrant of the blogopshere)!

At any rate, here is the lineup:

The Prologue to the symposium suggests that mainstream economics has unduly flattened economic issues down to certain modes of thought (such as ‘Max U’); it suggests that economics needs enrichment by formulations that have religious or quasi-religious overtones.

Robin Klay helps to set the stage with her exploration“Where Do Economists of Faith Hang Out? Their Journals and Associations, plus Luminaries Among Them.”

Seventeen response essays are contributed by authors representing a broad range of religious traditions and ideological outlooks:

Pavel Chalupníček:
From an Individual to a Person: What Economics Can Learn from Theology About Human Beings

Victor V. Claar:
Joyful Economics

Charles M. A. Clark:
Where There Is No Vision, Economists Will Perish

Ross B. Emmett:
Economics Is Not All of Life

Daniel K. Finn:
Philosophy, Not Theology, Is the Key for Economics: A Catholic Perspective

David George:
Moving from the Empirically Testable to the Merely Plausible: How Religion and Moral Philosophy Can Broaden Economics

Jayati Ghosh:
Notes of an Atheist on Economics and Religion

M. Kabir Hassan and William J. Hippler, III:
Entrepreneurship and Islam: An Overview

Mary Hirschfeld:
On the Relationship Between Finite and Infinite Goods, Or: How to Avoid Flattening

Abbas Mirakhor:
The Starry Heavens Above and the Moral Law Within: On the Flatness of Economics

Andrew P. Morriss:
On the Usefulness of a Flat Economics to the World of Faith

Edd Noell:
What Has Jerusalem to Do with Chicago (or Cambridge)? Why Economics Needs an Infusion of Religious Formulations

Eric B. Rasmusen:
Maximization Is Fine—But Based on What Assumptions?

Rupert Read and Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
Religion, Heuristics, and Intergenerational Risk Management

Russell Roberts:
Sympathy for Homo Religiosus

A. M. C. Waterman:
Can ‘Religion’ Enrich ‘Economics’?

Andrew M. Yuengert:
Sin, and the Economics of ‘Sin’

Not too shabby, eh? I’ll admit upfront I haven’t been able to read any of the articles yet, but once I find some work out here in Austin I’ll be able to patch together a schedule that’ll allow for a little leisure. You can always download the entire issue, too (pdf). Econ Journal Watch is an important project that is dedicated to exploring and criticizing the underlying assumptions of the discipline of economics, but it is done in a way that is classy, professional, and informative.