This issue features the publication of Acton’s 2015 Novak Award winner Catherine Pakaluk’s lecture, “Dependence on God and Man: Toward a Catholic Constitution of Liberty,” in addition to our regular slate of peer-reviewed articles.
As a special feature, this issue contains two symposia of conference papers: The Evangelical Theological Society Theology of Work Symposium and Freedom with Justice: Rerum Novarum and the New Things of Our Time, originally held in Rome, Italy.
Related to this, executive editor Jordan Ballor explores the overlapping foci of Protestant and Roman Catholic social thought in his editorial “The Pope, the Professor, and the Poor,” examining the contributions of Abraham Kuyper and Pope Leo XIII to Christian engagement with poverty in the modern world.
Ballor writes,
This year marks the 125th anniversary of two foundational texts for the formation of modern Christian social thought. In the spring of 1891, Pope Leo XIII promulgated the encyclical Rerum Novarum, on the “new things” of the modern world, particularly the relationship between capital and labor, following revolutions in politics, economics, and society. And in the fall of that year, the professor Abraham Kuyper, who was also a newspaper editor, politician, and would later become prime minister of the Netherlands, opened the first Christian Social Congress in Amsterdam with a speech: “The Social Question and the Christian Religion.” These two figures, one Roman Catholic and one Reformed, helped provide substantive conceptual and animating frameworks for Christian social engagement and study for the next century and beyond.
The full editorial is open access and can be read and downloaded here.
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Image credits:
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)
The State Lottery Office
(‘The Poor and Money’) June 1883
Image Source: Wikipedia Commons