Thomas Patrick Burke
D.Phil.,D.Th.
President, Wynnewood Institute, Professor Emeritus of Religion, Temple University
William Dunkelberg
Professor of Economics at the School of Business and Management, Temple University (Formerly Dean of the Fox School of Business)
A Panel with William Dunkelberg and Thomas Patrick Burke
William Dunkelberg’s Notes on the Economy Excerpt
“An uptick in…lending could help businesses expand and reduce employment,” says the report, reflecting the view that it is credit supply that is the problem. The banks mentioned in the article are all of the “biggies” who had, and still have, major loan-loss problems and pulled away from small business lending. Missing in the report are references to the thousands of community banks who did not get caught up in the “bubble” and are the mainstay of lending to Main Street firms. Yes, credit is harder to get now at these banks than it was during the bubble, and it should be. Underwriting standards were seriously compromised, and bubble prices overstated the true value of collateral.
That the real problem is loan demand was confirmed while speaking to bank organizations in half a dozen states over the past year. Loans have to be repaid, meaning that the money must be used to finance the acquisition of employees or equipment that will “pay back” the loan. This is common sense. But a record numbers of owners – as high as twenty-eight percent – have reported that “weak sales” is their top business problem, while only four…
Read Prof. Dunkelberg’s latest “Notes on the Economy”
About Thomas Burke Excerpt
Thomas Patrick Burke was professor of religion at Temple University for twenty-nine years, taking early retirement in 1996. Originally from Brisbane, Australia, his initial interests were in science, especially physics, and he still retains a lively amateur interest in that field. In the course of time, however, his concerns became more theological. He studied at the University of Munich during the 1960s, completing a doctorate in theology with a dissertation on the nineteenth-century German theologian, Matthias Scheeben, then taught in the School of Religion at the University of Iowa. In 1965 he became director of the John XXIII Institute at Saint Xavier College (now University), Chicago, where in 1966 he organized a historic conference of the principal theologians associated with the Second Vatican Council, introducing the novel conceptions of the Council, in a series of original papers, to the United States for the first time. During this time he edited and published the conference papers under the title The Word in History (Sheed & Ward, 1966). He also arranged for Prof. Michael Schmaus of the University of Munich during a year’s residence in Chicago to produce a new version of his multi-volume Dogmatic for the English-speaking world and edited and translated it into English (published by Sheed & Ward in six volumes beginning in 1967).
After a year spent doing research again in Munich, he joined Temple University in the fall of 1967. This led him to embark on the study of world religions, including field work in the Middle East and East Asia with summers in Iran, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Israel. In 1974 he published The Reluctant Vision (Fortress Press), an attempt to extend the field of the philosophy of religion, which till then was concerned with traditional Christian conceptions of God and the soul, to the study of world…