"Love and Capitalism": TNR on PB16

Here (thanks to Michael Sean Winters, at America, for the link) is a piece, by David Niremberg, on the Pope's recent encyclical, Caritas in Veritate.  (I posted some thoughts, here, a while back about the encyclical and the ways that, in my view, it was being understood and misunderstood.)

It is, to be sure, a good and welcome thing that a magazine like The New Republic appreciates the significance of Caritas, and devotes space to thinking about it. "Benedict," he says, "is an influential voice asking a basic question about our markets and our societies: can the values they require to function properly be produced from within themselves, or must those values come from beyond themselves? His question, and his answer, deserve our critical attention. . . .  [P]apal economics are built upon a shared bedrock of belief: the conviction that material prosperity is important, but that humans were created for a higher good; that they cannot escape the dangers of mere materialism and achieve that higher good without God's help; and finally that the price of failure in this effort is nothing less than the loss of our humanity."

There are some places where Niremberg and I would disagree.  He is too quick to see "dogmatism" in the Pope's (unremarkable) claim that Christianity provides the best (indeed, really, the only) foundation for integral human development.  This concluding paragraph, in particular, disappoints, in its breezy embrace of the (I would have thought) worn-out insistence that Christians' proposals about the world -- if they are to affect the world -- should not be specifically Christian, and should not be presented as grounded in truth:

In a de-secularizing age, and with our faith in self-interest shaken by economic crisis, we should want to draw on the wisdom in that ocean of thought. But if those teachings are to contribute to global "unity and peace," they will have to be taught in a way that seeks to transcend the boundaries of the traditions that produced them. This does not mean, as Benedict fears, that Christianity (or any other religion) must become "more or less interchangeable with a pool of good sentiments, helpful for social cohesion, but of little relevance," or that "there would no longer be any real place for God in the world." Values are not a zero-sum game. God's place in the world is not lost when one religion tries to translate some of its truths into helpful good sentiments for those of other or no faith, something that Pius XI and John Paul II both understood. Benedict presents his encyclical as a continuation of their teaching, but in this regard he did not follow their example. His "love" is narrowed by his "truth."

I do not see this "narrow[ing]," but, in any event, read the whole thing.  I'd welcome others' reactions.