Tim Shaughnessy

Tim Shaughnessy is a cradle Catholic who began to take his faith seriously after meeting his then-Baptist future wife. She is now the wonderful Catholic mom to his two sons. Tim has undergraduate degrees in economics and political science, and a Master’s and Ph.D. in economics. He teaches economics at the undergraduate and graduate level, and is a faculty advisor for the campus Catholic student organization.

Mr. Biden, tear down this wall!

My co-blogger at CatholicVote, Stephen Kokx, links to an AP story about Veep Biden who apparently has little concern for blurring the line between church and state. From the AP story: Vice President Joe Biden wants pastors, rabbis and nuns to tell their flocks that enacting gun control is the moral thing to do… Biden met [...]

Making Mass more Dense

You can probably toss this in the bulging “How do I get more out of Mass?” file, but, hey, I’ve never written a blog post on the topic myself so here goes. We’ve simultaneously passed two tipping points in our young boys’ behavior during Mass. Our oldest, just over four, now can manage to be [...]

Better living through charts

Well, maybe just one chart; I don’t want you to pull a muscle on a Friday morning. I saw a link through the Acton PowerBlog that referenced a post by James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute. It is humbly titled “The most important economic chart in Western civilization — and how it happened.” Here is the chart: [...]

The Theology of Bigness

I had the opportunity in the past month to visit a few places that emphasized to me the importance of scale. A business trip took me to Maui, and a few weeks later while visiting another town I got to attend Mass at a rather large downtown cathedral, while passing by a so-called “megachurch.” Reflecting [...]

There is no great stagnation

(Warning: Friday fun day non-serious post) We’re constantly told that the end is nigh, that society will soon be collapsing, or at least that the near future is going to be worse than the recent past. The image almost is of a society that inevitably reverts back to a hunter-gatherer society because of, well, take [...]

Happy Creation Day!

I’ll admit to being a little apathetic about Earth Day (if you are apathetic, shouldn’t that mean that you are not pathetic?). In a post-Christian world, the vacuum left by refusing to worship God is often filled by subconsciously worshipping Gaia. It has lots of parallels: sacraments (recycling, locavorism, etc.); commandments; prophets; evangelists, appropriate vestments; [...]

The reality of “just” wages after the Great Recession

I’ve dealt with this issue more at CatholicVote (e.g., here and here), but wanted to mention something about the morality of just wages and labor in general in Catholic Social Teaching here at T&C, spurred on somewhat by Matt’s reflections on the uncertainties of the current job market. I’ll start with a summary of my [...]