Benedictine College held its annual Symposium on Transforming Culture on its campus in Atchison, Kansas, on March 21-22, 2025. The event attracted about 300 scholars, students and concerned Catholics who discussed the theme “Marriage on the Peripheries.” The main event was preceded by a Business Summit that addressed the same family theme. John Horvat II, author of Return to Order, was one of the summit’s three featured speakers.
Mr. Horvat presented a one-hour talk titled “We Want an Economy With God, Not a Godless Economy.” He showed how a God-centered economy is a valid and necessary business model for today. Such a model is based on Catholic principles developed in the times of Christendom.
The author explained the obstacles keeping the present economy from being God-centered. He especially mentioned the frenetic intemperance of the business sphere, where everything is hurried, unrestrained and unbridled.
“The key to understanding why we don’t have a We-Want-God economy, Mr. Horvat noted, “is because we have insisted upon separating what should be together. We have sought to avoid the messy and difficult task of following the moral law in business and the demands of charity in dealing with our fellow man.”
The author addressed possible solutions that reflected the symposium’s theme, including developing the family and an intense love of God.
On March 24, John Horvat addressed the ethics and moral seminar for graduating business and accounting majors. The weekly meeting features speakers who will present themes that will help the graduates as they enter the business world.
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Mr. Horvat delivered a presentation titled “What is the True Role of Economics. He discussed four premises for the proper functioning of business and economics. The first one was not to see economics as the only and most important prism to see life. The second one was the need to have recourse to other sciences to help regulate and perfect economics and business. The author also spoke of the need to cultivate the human and supernatural elements in the practice of business as a means to reaching success.
“We are called to engage in a Catholic counter-revolution that affects the business world. You can do this by insisting on keeping economics in its proper place and focusing on the human and supernatural elements that are so needed in our materialistic world.”
Both the featured speech and the one-hour seminar drew from ideas in the book Return to Order: From a Frenzied Economy to an Organic Christian Society—Where We’ve Been, How We Go Here, and Where We Need to Go.
Need a speaker for your group, function or college event? See about having John Horvat speak by contacting him directly at jh1908@aol.com.