Earlier this week, two leading Catholic political bloggers, Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig and Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry (better known as Pegobry, or just PEG), engaged in a short but sharp exchange on one of my favorite subjects, property rights (see here, here, here, and here). Although I can hardly claim to be an expert on the subject, I’ve long lamented the absence of substantive discourse on the subject among political theologians and Christian ethicists, so Liz Bruenig’s recent attempts to foreground the issue have been a breath of fresh air. Pegobry, however, raised some rather important questions, or at the very least the sorts of questions that most conservatives are likely to raise, and given the frequency with which I encounter such questions, I think they deserve to be explored a bit further than they were in the inconclusive interchange.
So although I am told that a day is as a thousand years on the internet and a four-day-old discussion is too stale to bother resurrecting, I will venture some reflections of my own.
