In the spring of 1961, Spencer Heath gave a series of talks at Chapman College in California. At 84 years old, he had lived an extraordinary life with significant accomplishments in widely varied fields. His ideas were original, profound, far ahead of their time, and had a far-reaching impact on his audience. John L. Davis, the President of Chapman College, understood the importance of Heath's insights and had the speeches, including the question and answer session after each one, professionally recorded on the best sound equipment available at the time.
Hoping that the speeches would be made into a book, President Davis turned the tapes over to Heath, who also wished to use them as the basis for a book. His grandson, Spencer Heath MacCallum, who had been working with him since graduating from Princeton a few years earlier, had not been able to attend the lectures but transcribed all the tapes. Heath died in 1963 without writing the book, and MacCallum went on to a career as a social anthropologist with varied accomplishments of his own.
But Spencer MacCallum never forgot his lifelong desire to publicize his grandfather's ideas. He had recorded and transcribed many conversations with Heath and preserved all his papers. When the technology became available in his later years, MacCallum digitized all the transcripts and other documents. He eventually returned to the speeches and expanded the Q&A's with Heath's own words to allow a complete expression of Heath's unique insights into both economics and spirituality.
In December of 2019, a horrendous accident seemed to make his dream of finishing
Economics and the Spiritual Life of Free Men impossible. However, the COVID-19 pandemic led to his discovery of a collaborator who shared his vision. They decided on a singular format adding fictional elements to provide context to an event that happened almost sixty years prior and were able to complete the work.
"The book offers a valuable perspective on religion that I hadn't seen before. I especially liked the stress on the spiritual dimensions of the free market and the demonstration that we can follow the Golden Rule in business." -
David Gordon, Mises Institute
"If you're a Christian of any stripe; if you're a free marketer of any stripe; if you're a scientist or engineer of any stripe... please read this book. It matters." -
Paul Rosenberg, author,
Free-man's Perspective“Spencer Heath artfully elaborates a dynamic, organic, and thoroughly spiritual framework for understanding the growth and enrichment effected by peaceful, voluntary, extended social cooperation rooted in interdependence and reciprocity. This genuinely spiritual understanding of economic life—which understands our mutual enrichment as creative participation in God’s own creative activity in the world—highlights the ways in which rules that protect property and market exchange enable people to offer each other grace by meeting each other’s needs. Heath’s provocative work has the potential to prove illuminating and challenging to theologians and social scientists as well as ordinary readers who wish to understand the place of economic exchange in God’s world.” -
Gary Chartier, Tom and Vi Zapara School of Business, La Sierra University
"Spencer Heath’s lectures, illuminated in this collection by editors Spencer MacCallum and Joyce Brand, synthesize Christian teaching with market economics to produce an integrated whole. The result will prompt readers to question assumptions about government and marvel at the limitless potential offered by spontaneous order and nonaggression in all spheres of life." -
Lawrence W. Reed, president emeritus, Foundation for Economic Education
