Contributors to this volume assess the meaning of globalization and the capacity of Catholic social thought to understand, reform, and guide it.

An important new volume showcasing a wide range of faith-based responses to one of today's most pressing social issues, challenging us to expand our ways of understanding. Land of Stark Contrasts brings together the work of social scientists, ethicists, and theologians exploring the profound role of religion in understanding and responding to homelessness and housing insecurity in all corners of the United States-from Seattle, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley to Dallas and San Antonio to Washington, D.C., and Boston. Together, the essays of Land of Stark Contrasts chart intriguing ways forward for future initiatives to address the root causes of homelessness. In this way they are essential reading for practical theologians, congregational leaders, and faith-based nonprofit organizers exploring how to combine spiritual and material care for homeless individuals and other vulnerable populations. Social workers, nonprofit managers, and policy specialists seeking to understand how to partner better with faith-based organizations will also find the chapters in this volume an invaluable resource. Contributors include James V. Spickard, Manuel Mejido Costoya and Margaret Breen, Michael R. Fisher Jr., Laura Stivers, Lauren Valk Lawson, Bruce Granville Miller, Nancy A. Khalil, John A. Coleman, S.J., Jeremy Phillip Brown, Paul Houston Blankenship, Maria Teresa Davila, Roberto Mata, and Sathianathan Clarke. Co-published with Seattle University's Center for Religious Wisdom and World Affairs

Parishes are the missing middle in studies of American Catholicism. Between individual Catholics and a global institution, the thousands of local parishes are where Catholicism gets remade. American Parishes showcases what social forces shape parishes, what parishes do, how they do it, and what this says about the future of Catholicism in the United States. Expounding an embedded field approach, this book displays the numerous forces currently reshaping American parishes. It draws from sociology of religion, culture, organizations, and race to illuminate basic parish processes, like leadership and education, and ongoing parish struggles like conflict and multiculturalism. American Parishes brings together contemporary data, methods, and questions to establish a sociological re-engagement with Catholic parishes and a Catholic re-engagement with sociological analysis. Contributions by leading social scientists highlight how community, geography, and authority intersect within parishes. It illuminates and analyzes how growing racial diversity, an aging religious population, and neighborhood change affect the inner workings of parishes. Contributors: Gary J. Adler Jr., Nancy Ammerman, Mary Jo Bane, Tricia C. Bruce, John A. Coleman, S.J., Kathleen Garces-Foley, Mary Gray, Brett Hoover, Courtney Ann Irby, Tia Noelle Pratt, and Brian Starks

An important new volume showcasing a wide range of faith-based responses to one of today's most pressing social issues, challenging us to expand our ways of understanding. Land of Stark Contrasts brings together the work of social scientists, ethicists, and theologians exploring the profound role of religion in understanding and responding to homelessness and housing insecurity in all corners of the United States-from Seattle, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley to Dallas and San Antonio to Washington, D.C., and Boston. Together, the essays of Land of Stark Contrasts chart intriguing ways forward for future initiatives to address the root causes of homelessness. In this way they are essential reading for practical theologians, congregational leaders, and faith-based nonprofit organizers exploring how to combine spiritual and material care for homeless individuals and other vulnerable populations. Social workers, nonprofit managers, and policy specialists seeking to understand how to partner better with faith-based organizations will also find the chapters in this volume an invaluable resource. Contributors include James V. Spickard, Manuel Mejido Costoya and Margaret Breen, Michael R. Fisher Jr., Laura Stivers, Lauren Valk Lawson, Bruce Granville Miller, Nancy A. Khalil, John A. Coleman, S.J., Jeremy Phillip Brown, Paul Houston Blankenship, Maria Teresa Davila, Roberto Mata, and Sathianathan Clarke. Co-published with Seattle University's Center for Religious Wisdom and World Affairs

Sheed & Ward, in partnership with the Commonweal Foundation and with funding from the Pew Charitable Trust, proudly presents the first of two volumes in a groundbreaking series called American Catholics in the Public Square. The result of a three-year study sponsored by Pew aimed at understanding the contributions to U.S. civic life of the Catholic, Jewish, mainline and evangelical Protestant, African-American, Latino, and Muslim communities in the United States, the two volumes in this series gather selected essays from the Commonweal Colloquia and the joint meetings organized by the Commonweal Foundation and The Faith and Reason Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. Participants in the Commonweal colloquia and the joint meetings-leading Catholic scholars, journalists, lawyers, business and labor leaders, novelists and poets, church administrators and lobbyists, activists, policy makers and politicians-produced approximately forty-five essays presented at ten meetings that brought together over two hundred and fifty participants. The two volumes in the American Catholics in the Public Square Series address many of the most critical issues now facing the Catholic Church in the United States by drawing from the four goals of the colloquia-to identify, assess, and critique the distinctive elements in Catholicism's approach to civic life; to generate concrete analyses and recommendations for strengthening Catholic civic engagement; to encompass a broad spectrum of political and social views of Catholics to encourage dialogue between Catholic leaders, religious and secular media, and political thinkers; to reexamine the long-standing Catholic belief in the obligation to promote the common good and to clarify how Catholics may work better with those holding other religious or philosophical convictions toward revitalizing both the religious environment and civic participation in the American republic. This first volume, American Catholics and Civic Engagement: A Distinctive Voice, includes a general introduction by Peter Steinfels and is structured in four parts, each of which include a brief overview. Part One, Catholic Thought in the American Context, explore the fundamental concepts that underlie Catholic social thought and their relevance to American public debate and public policy-the intellectual tools with which Catholics have often participated in the public square. Part Two, Catholic Institutions in the American Public Square, reveals the Church's vast presence in the American public square-from the church steeples that dot urban landscapes to primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities, hospitals, clinics and nursing homes, social service centers, orphanages, and shelters-and provides a detailed analysis of the place of the parish in the public square, the activities of the bishops' conferences in New York, Wisconsin, and the California, and the challenges facing Catholic health care providers. Part Three, Catholics in the Public Square: Autobiographies, includes the personal stories of politicians, journalists, lawyers, business executives, and labor leaders who describe how their faith shaped and is shaped by their work. Part Four, Catholics in the Voting Booth, relies on data from two wide-ranging surveys of how Catholics vote and assesses the impact on Catholic voters of the Catholic social tradition, of sermons, of parish community and sacramental life, and of papal and episcopal statements.

Parishes are the missing middle in studies of American Catholicism. Between individual Catholics and a global institution, the thousands of local parishes are where Catholicism gets remade. American Parishes showcases what social forces shape parishes, what parishes do, how they do it, and what this says about the future of Catholicism in the United States. Expounding an embedded field approach, this book displays the numerous forces currently reshaping American parishes. It draws from sociology of religion, culture, organizations, and race to illuminate basic parish processes, like leadership and education, and ongoing parish struggles like conflict and multiculturalism. American Parishes brings together contemporary data, methods, and questions to establish a sociological re-engagement with Catholic parishes and a Catholic re-engagement with sociological analysis. Contributions by leading social scientists highlight how community, geography, and authority intersect within parishes. It illuminates and analyzes how growing racial diversity, an aging religious population, and neighborhood change affect the inner workings of parishes. Contributors: Gary J. Adler Jr., Nancy Ammerman, Mary Jo Bane, Tricia C. Bruce, John A. Coleman, S.J., Kathleen Garces-Foley, Mary Gray, Brett Hoover, Courtney Ann Irby, Tia Noelle Pratt, and Brian Starks

"Christian Political Ethics" brings together leading Christian scholars of diverse theological and ethical perspectives--Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anabaptist--to address fundamental questions of state and civil society, international law and relations, the role of the nation, and issues of violence and its containment. Representing a unique fusion of faith-centered ethics and social science, the contributors bring into dialogue their own varying Christian understandings with a range of both secular ethical thought and other religious viewpoints from Judaism, Islam, and Confucianism. They explore divergent Christian views of state and society--and the limits of each. They grapple with the tensions that can arise within Christianity over questions of patriotism, civic duty, and loyalty to one's nation, and they examine Christian responses to pluralism and relativism, globalization, and war and peace. Revealing the striking pluralism inherent to Christianity itself, this pioneering volume recasts the meanings of Christian citizenship and civic responsibility, and raises compelling new questions about civil disobedience, global justice, and Christian justifications for waging war as well as spreading world peace. It brings Christian political ethics out of the churches and seminaries to engage with today's most vexing and complex social issues.

The contributors are Michael Banner, Nigel Biggar, Joseph Boyle, Michael G. Cartwright, John A. Coleman, S.J., John Finnis, Theodore J. Koontz, David Little, Richard B. Miller, James W. Skillen, and Max L. Stackhouse.

An international journal of theology; a catholic journal in the widest sense: rooted in Roman Catholicism yet open to other Christian traditions and the world's faiths. Promotes discussion in the spirit of Vatican II. Annual subscriptions available.

Concilium has long been a household-name for cutting-edge critical and constructive theological thinking. Past contributors include leading Catholic scholars such as Hans Kung, Gregory Baum and Edward Schillebeeckx, and the editors of the review belong to the international "who's who" in the world of contemporary theology.