Radical Sufficiency: Work, Livelihood, and a US Catholic Economic Ethic (Moral Traditions) - Hardcover

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Christine Firer Hinze is a professor of theological ethics and director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University. She is the author of Comprehending Power in Christian Social Ethics and Glass Ceilings and Dirt Floors: Women, Work, and the Global Economy. She is also the coeditor of More Than a Monologue: Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church: Voices of Our Times with J. Patrick Hornbeck, II, and of Working Alternatives: American and Catholic Experiments in Work and Economy with John C. Seitz.

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Christian Ethics

“Arising from a lifetime of experience with these issues, Christine Firer Hinze’s Radical Sufficiency is a refreshingly insightful look at how Catholic faith should encounter gender, race, class, and pervasive consumerism. She outlines a realistic ethic for a just economic order. A brilliant book.”—Daniel K. Finn, William E. and Virginia Clemens Professor of Economics and Liberal Arts and professor of theology, St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict

“What does it mean to have adequate income? How may we ensure that all members of society enjoy true sufficiency? This highly original volume explores how race, gender, and social class intersect with social obligations as developed by the Catholic tradition of advocacy for worker rights, and especially by its early twentieth-century progenitor Monsignor John Ryan.”—Thomas Massaro, SJ, professor of moral theology, Fordham University

“Hinze calls us to become persons of solidarity and sufficiency, to work together toward an economy of dignified livelihood for every family. What a beacon of hope!”—Kate Ward, assistant professor, Department of Theology, Marquette University

In this timely book, Christine Firer Hinze looks back at the influential teachings of priest-economist Monsignor John A. Ryan, who supported worker justice and defended a living wage for all Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. Advancing Ryan’s efforts to articulate a persuasive plan for social reform, Hinze advocates for an action-oriented livelihood agenda that situates US working families’ economic pursuits within a comprehensive commitment to sustainable “radical sufficiency” for all.

Documenting the daily lives and economic struggles of past and present US Catholic working-class families, Hinze explores the larger impulses and patterns—economic, cultural, political, moral, and spiritual—that affect the work these people perform in homes, in communities, and at paid jobs. Their story is intertwined with the larger history of the American dream and working people’s pursuit of a dignified livelihood.

Surveying this history with an eye to the dynamics of power and difference, Hinze rethinks Ryan’s ethics and Catholic social teaching to develop a new conception of a decent livelihood and its implications for contemporary policy and practice. The result is a critical Catholic economic ethic capable of addressing the situations of workers and families in the interdependent global economy of the twenty-first century.

Christine Firer Hinze is a professor of theological ethics, chair of the Department of Theology, and former director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University. She is the author of Comprehending Power in Christian Social Ethics and Glass Ceilings and Dirt Floors: Women, Work, and the Global Economy and coeditor of More Than a Monologue: Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church: Voices of Our Times with J. Patrick Hornbeck II and Working Alternatives: American and Catholic Experiments in Work and Economy with John C. Seitz.

Moral Traditions Series