Where Your Treasure Is, by Dylan Pahman

By Dylan Pahman, Acton Institute, July 28, 2025

Dylan Pahman is a research fellow at the Acton Institute, where he serves as executive editor of the Journal of Markets & Morality. He earned his Ph.D. from St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, London, on the basis of his published works on Orthodox Christian social thought and asceticism. He is the author of The Kingdom of God and the Common Good and Foundations of a Free & Virtuous Society.

‘Belisarius Begging for Alms’ by Jacques-Louis David (1781)

Helen Rhee has done a great service with her slim volume Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity. This collection of primary sources from the Church Fathers’ teachings on money, lending, justice, mercy, and almsgiving contributes to a growing list of such handbooks. Anyone wanting to teach a course or simply educate oneself in the Fathers’ wisdom about stewarding the resources of creation has an abundant storehouse to draw from, even as more undoubtedly could be added in years to come.

Rhee corrects naïve readings of the Scriptures and the Fathers as “communist” immediately from her introduction: The common sharing of resources and distribution to the needy in Acts 2 and 4 “hardly suggests that these assemblies practiced ‘communism’ in an anachronistic, modern political-economic sense.” Indeed, Rhee contextualizes these primary sources with a summary of the economic conditions of the Roman Empire. In short:  ….

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