I was reading Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si when I began an article called “What is Wrong with the West’s Economies?” Published in the August 13, 2015 issue of The New York Review of Books, the article is by Edmund Phelps, 2006 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Director of Columbia’s Center on Capitalism and Society, and…

The year began not with Homer or Plato but with a book I had actually heard of—the Book of Genesis. Our professors urged us to read it not as the infallible voice of truth, a literal account of science and history. Nor did they present it as a mere anthropological artifact, reflecting the biases of its authors and nothing more. They were introducing the idea of a great book, a text that yields up riches to both trained scholars and attentive novices.