Book Review: The Catholic Worker Movement – Intellectual and Spiritual Origins by Mark and Louise Zwick

(My husband showed me this book in a half-price bookstore a couple of years ago and after reading it my life has never been the same. This book introduced me to the Catholic Worker movement, which I barely knew beforehand. It now stands as the first of many books I have read about the movement [...]

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Voluntary Poverty and Solidarity

The Case for Utopia The world would be better off if people tried to become better. And people would become better if they stopped trying to become better off. For when everybody tries to become better off, nobody is better off. But when everybody tries to become better, everybody is better off. Everybody would be [...]

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The Later Prophets and Social Justice

(When we start looking at Catholic Social Teaching, we always have to go back to its main source: Sacred Scriptures and the Later Prophets have a message that is never out-of-date. Below is a short essay I had to write for my Old Testament class) The Deuteronomistic History is comprised in the books of Joshua, [...]

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Universality of God’s Creation

Hannah Arendt in her Essays in Understanding went a step further when talking about how many Germans felt ashamed of being German following the atrocities committed during the Nazi regime when she said: “I have often felt tempted to answer that I felt ashamed of being human.” She says this because of the Judeo-Christian understanding [...]

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Gaudium et spes on respect for human dignity

Wishing to come down to topics that are practical and of some urgency, the Council lays stress on respect for the human person: everyone should look upon his neighbor (without any exception) as another self, bearing in mind above all his life and the means necessary for living it in a dignified way lest he [...]

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You notice them, but do you really see them?

(This post was originally written by my boyfriend, Michael Joseph, at our former blog) You’ve noticed him, but do you really see him? That is, do you see a person? The homeless, the hungry and the forsaken are all around us. Jesus promised us that, but he did not choose it to be so: “The [...]

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“We Must Use Our Eyes!”

“We Must Use Our Eyes!” is the name of one of the chapters in Joseph Ratzinger’s book Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures. This chapter follows his discussion of the right to life and abortion. He starts the chapter by saying: The moral drama, the decision for good or evil, begins with our eyes, when [...]

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