Walter, your ignorant, intolerant, closed-minded, and anti-scholarly “colleague” is indeed a very big dummy and a hypocrite. If he (or she) was the expert on “the Ignatian tradition” among the Jesuits that he pretends to be, he would know that St. Ignatius himself lived by the motto of “find God in all things.” NOT “find God in all things except for Austrian economics and Austrian School economists.”
At Loyola University Maryland when John Allison, the former chairman of BB&T, offered me a grant through the BB&T Foundation for an academic program on “the moral foundations of capitalism” the Jesuit administration told me that giving free copies of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged to all the business school students, which Mr. Allison wanted to do, was “a deal breaker.” I could not accept the grant, they said, if I intended to give these free books to the students. First they told me that they didn’t want people to think that Randianism was “the official view” of the university, an argument that they abandoned after I explained to them how nonsensical it was. They then resorted to “Ayn Rand was an atheist.” I responded by saying “so was Karl Marx. Does this mean that faculty can no longer use or quote his works?” I also asked if they surveyed every single author of textbooks used at the university to uncover any atheists among them. At that point the “debate” ended and they just reiterated that giving away the book was a deal breaker.
As you know, I did get the grant, after which the university administration instructed the public relations office to NOT issue a press release about it — something BB&T was very eager to do. An unsolicited $350,000 grant (over seven years) to a business school professor from the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, based solely on the man’s admiration for my book, How Capitalism Saved America, which he said he required his top executives to read, was an embarrassment to these cultural Marxist ideologues. This would never have been an issue if the title of my book was How Socialism Can Save America.
I was later told by the (former) academic vice president (a mathematician who was not a Jesuit) that the book “was not consistent with Catholic social teaching.” This of course suggests that the Jesuit definition of “Catholic social teaching” includes “ignorance is bliss” when it comes to non-Leftist literature. In the end, I got around their censorship of Atlas Shrugged by sponsoring an Atlas Shrugged essay contest for students with a $2,000 first prize.
There are a few exceptions, but the Jesuits are essentially poorly-educated communistic ideologues hiding behind priests’ collars and deceptive euphemisms for socialism such as “liberation theology.” Like the pope, for instance.
7:16 pm on April 22, 2018
