Download or read book Catholic Social Teaching and United States Welfare Reform written by Thomas Massaro and published by Michael Glazier Books. This book was released on 1998 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The passage of welfare reform lesiglation in 1996 has prompted the need for an evaluation of ethics in American social policy. "Catholic Social Teaching And United States Welfare Reform" examines how Catholic social teaching may be used as a resource for that evaluation, now and in the future. This is an informative book for anyone concerned with welfare reform or the place of faith in political action.

Download or read book Catholic Social Teaching and U S Welfare Reform written by Thomas J. Massaro (S.J.) and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book United States Welfare Policy written by Thomas J. Massaro, SJ and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2007-05-02 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 drastically changed the delivery of social services in the United States for the first time in sixty years. More than a decade later, according to Catholic social ethicist Thomas Massaro, a disturbing gap exists between the laws we have enacted as a nation and the moral concerns we profess as a people. Massaro contends that ethicists too often focus on strictly theoretical concerns rather than engaging concrete social and political issues, while public policy experts are uncomfortable drawing ethical judgments about legislation. United States Welfare Policy takes a fresh approach to the topic by using Catholic social teaching as a lens through which to view contemporary American welfare policies, citing the tradition's emphasis on serving the needy—including a preferential option for the poor—and the common good. Massaro maintains that the most important outcome of welfare policy is not the cost-effectiveness of programs, but the well-being of individual families. The concluding analysis of this thoughtful study applies Catholic ethical concerns to specific aspects of welfare reform, including the funding mechanisms for the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program, work participation requirements affecting the bond between mothers and children, eligibility rules, the intrusion of family caps into reproductive decisions, and the imposition of disproportionate burdens upon particular demographic groups. Massaro offers possible alternatives in each case and, as the fight over reauthorization of the welfare act continues, he calls on Catholic churches and clergy and laity to take action and advocate publicly for a more ethical approach to welfare reform.

Download or read book Lifting Up the Poor written by Mary Jo Bane and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2003-10-10 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People who participate in debates about the causes and cures of poverty often speak from religious conviction. But those convictions are rarely made explicit or debated on their own terms. Rarely is the influence of personal religious commitment on policy decisions examined. Two of the nation's foremost scholars and policy advocates break the mold in this lively volume, the first to be published in the new Pew Forum Dialogues on Religion and Public Life. The authors bring their faith traditions, policy experience, academic expertise, and political commitments together in this moving, pointed, and informed discussion of poverty, one of our most vexing public issues. Mary Jo Bane writes of her experiences running social service agencies, work that has been informed by "Catholic social teaching, and a Catholic sensibility that is shaped every day by prayer and worship." Policy analysis, she writes, is often "indeterminate" and "inconclusive." It requires grappling with "competing values that must be balanced." It demands judgment calls, and Bane's Catholic sensibility informs the calls she makes. Drawing from various Christian traditions, Lawrence Mead's essay discusses the role of nurturing Christian virtues and personal responsibility as a means of transforming a "defeatist culture" and combating poverty. Quoting Shelley, Mead describes theologians as the "unacknowledged legislators of mankind" and argues that even nonbelievers can look to the Christian tradition as "the crucible that formed the moral values of modern politics." Bane emphasizes the social justice claims of her tradition, and Mead challenges the view of many who see economic poverty as a biblical priority that deserves "preference ahead of other social concerns." But both assert that an engagement with religious traditions is indispensable to an honest and searching debate about poverty, policy choices, and the public purposes of religion.

Download or read book Who Will Provide The Changing Role Of Religion In American Social Welfare written by Mary Jo Bane and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-28 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars examine how the church, community organizations, and the government must work together to provide for America's poor in the aftermath of welfare reform. . Who will provide for Americas children, elderly, and working families? Not since the 1930s has our nation faced such fundamental choices over how to care for all its citizens. Now, amid economic prosperity, Americans are asking what government, business, and non-profit organizations can and can’t do and what they should and shouldn’t be asked to do. As both political parties look to faith-based organizations to meet material and spiritual needs, the center of this historic debate is the changing role of religion. These essays combine a fresh perspective and detailed analysis on these pressing issues. They emerge from a three-year Harvard Seminar sponsored by the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life that brought together scholars in public policy, government, religion, sociology, law, education, and non-profit leadership. By putting the present moment in broad historical perspective, these essays offer rich insights into the resources of faith-based organizations, while cautioning against viewing their expanded role as an alternative to the government’s responsibility. In Who Will Provide? community leaders, organizational managers, public officials, and scholars will find careful analysis drawing on a number of fields to aid their work of devising better partnerships of social provision locally and nationally. It was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 2001..

Download or read book Economic Justice for All written by Catholic Church. National Conference of Catholic Bishops and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Place at the Table written by Judith Ann Brady and published by Twenty-Third Publications. This book was released on 2007-10 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's one thing to say that we believe in justice for all, but quite another to actively seek social justice for the poor in our midst. After extensive research, the author is convinced that a huge gap exists between talking about justice and actually doing justice for the poor. She believes that achieving justice for all requires a deep and broad approach that involves the integration of Catholic social teaching with Scripture and Tradition so that charity and justice actually become social justice. Only when people-every race, nationality, class, and religion-are educated for justice, built on respect for the person and the responsibility of individuals and the community, will we in the U.S. be able to cut through the rhetoric of blame and move toward solidarity.

Download or read book Shaping Welfare Consensus written by Philip S. Land and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Rethinking Poverty written by James P. Bailey and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2010-09-14 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Rethinking Poverty, James P. Bailey argues that most contemporary policies aimed at reducing poverty in the United States are flawed because they focus solely on insufficient income. Bailey argues that traditional policies such as minimum wage laws, food stamps, housing subsidies, earned income tax credits, and other forms of cash and non-cash income supports need to be complemented by efforts that enable the poor to save and accumulate assets. Drawing on Michael Sherraden’s work on asset building and scholarship by Melvin Oliver, Thomas Shapiro, and Dalton Conley on asset discrimination, Bailey presents us with a novel and promising way forward to combat persistent and morally unacceptable poverty in the United States and around the world. Rethinking Poverty makes use of a significant body of Catholic social teachings in its argument for an asset development strategy to reduce poverty. These Catholic teachings include, among others, principles of human dignity, the social nature of the person, the common good, and the preferential option for the poor. These principles and the related social analyses have not yet been brought to bear on the idea of asset-building for the poor by those working within the Catholic social justice tradition. This book redresses this shortcoming, and further, claims that a Catholic moral argument for asset-building for the poor can be complemented and enriched by Martha Nussbaum’s “capabilities approach.” This book will affect current debates and practical ways to reduce poverty, as well as the future direction of Catholic social teaching.

Download or read book Living Justice written by Thomas Massaro, SJ and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-08-29 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces readers to Catholic social teaching, the Church’s long tradition of reflection on the meaning of social justice and how to enact it. The Church derives its faith-based principles for promoting justice and peace from rich sources in scripture, theology, reason, and human experience. These teachings, as contained in papal encyclicals and documents from global gatherings of bishops, have inspired broad efforts to advocate for so many important goals—including human rights, the common good, equitable international development, disarmament, healthy family life, and labor justice. Readers will be led step-by-step to a deeper understanding of the demands of social justice in the world today. They will also examine the building blocks of Catholic social teaching, including its key themes, sources, and methods for clarifying values and reaching firm conclusions, always in ways appropriate to pluralistic modern societies. Along the way, readers will encounter great heroes of social change and prophets of peace and justice. This new fourth edition includes expanded coverage of such topics as global migration and climate change, new case studies applying ethical principles to currently pressing social issues, and the major social teaching of Pope Francis. The book culminates with a description of the social justice advocacy of Pope Francis who has renewed Catholic social teaching in many distinctive ways. He has provided new resources that empower the church to navigate the many crises facing the world today. These include the refugee and environmental crises, profound challenges to family life and economic justice, and the desperate need for more effective diplomacy and global peacebuilding. A number of helpful resources contained in this volume, including eight tables, discussion questions, topics for further study, and an annotated list of print and web resources on Catholic social teaching, make this volume a perfect text for college-level courses on social justice.

Download or read book The Poor Belong to Us written by Dorothy M. BROWN and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the Civil War and World War II, Catholic charities evolved from volunteer and local origins into a centralized and professionally trained workforce that played a prominent role in the development of American welfare. Dorothy Brown and Elizabeth McKeown document the extraordinary efforts of Catholic volunteers to care for Catholic families and resist Protestant and state intrusions at the local level, and they show how these initiatives provided the foundation for the development of the largest private system of social provision in the United States. It is a story tightly interwoven with local, national, and religious politics that began with the steady influx of poor Catholic immigrants into urban centers. Supported by lay organizations and by sympathetic supporters in city and state politics, religious women operated foundling homes, orphanages, protectories, reformatories, and foster care programs for the children of the Catholic poor in New York City and in urban centers around the country. When pressure from reform campaigns challenged Catholic child care practices in the first decades of the twentieth century, Catholic charities underwent a significant transformation, coming under central diocesan control and growing increasingly reliant on the services of professional social workers. And as the Depression brought nationwide poverty and an overwhelming need for public solutions, Catholic charities faced a staggering challenge to their traditional claim to stewardship of the poor. In their compelling account, Brown and McKeown add an important dimension to our understanding of the transition from private to state social welfare. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The New York System 2. The Larger Landscape 3. Inside the Institutions: Foundlings, Orphans, Delinquents 4. Outside the Institutions: Pensions, Precaution, Prevention 5. Catholic Charities, the Great Depression, and the New Deal Conclusion Sources Notes Index Reviews of this book: [The Poor Belong to Us] raise[s] important questions about American social welfare history. [It] is particularly significant in that it restores Catholic charity to its rightful place at the center of that history. As the authors point out, Catholics represented the majority of dependent and delinquent children in most American cities for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their book convincingly demonstrates that Catholic charities' massive efforts to aid their own needy had long-term ramifications for the entire modern American system of welfare provision...The book is an impressive achievement and should be required reading for all social welfare historians. --Susan L. Porter, Journal of American History Reviews of this book: Brown and McKeown provide a richly documented narrative that incorporates the insights and scholarship of American Catholic history and social history...The Poor Belong to Us represents an ambitious foray into territory within the history of Catholic social activism that has been neglected for too long. It provides an important counterpoise and supplement to the burgeoning scholarship on individual congregations of women religious and the Catholic Worker movement, two area adjacent to this study that have received considerable attention in the past three decades...In The Poor Belong to Us, readers gain a new understanding of the complexities and internal tensions within the world of Catholic social welfare during the century of growth and change chronicled by Brown and McKeown...They show us how, for most American Catholics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, questions of class and social and economic responsibility can only be understood with reference to the faith, a pervasive yet elusive presence that Brown and McKeown illuminate for us in carefully pruned, contextualized examples from archival sources. --Debra Campbell, Church History Reviews of this book: This book documents the role of Catholics in the development of American welfare and shows strong parallels between situations and attitudes prevalent in the 19th century and those common today...Following the enactment of the 1996 welfare reform law, some of these same questions are being raised afresh today...That situation makes Brown and McKeown's historical account timely and relevant...Brown and McKeown neither try to sugarcoat nor to dramatize the role of Catholic charities in American welfare. The story is interesting enough in itself...This is an excellent work...For anyone wanting to better understand the role of Catholic charities in the American welfare system or even the development of charities and welfare in general, it is invaluable. --Diana Etindi, Indianapolis Star Reviews of this book: Thoroughly researched and meticulous in its reasoning...[this book] shows how Catholic charities helped poor people in America between the 1870s and 1930s...[It] remind[s] us how 'Catholic' poverty seemed for half a century, and how effectively a generation of more prosperous Catholics reacted to it. It also shows how the idea of caring for the poor, for centuries a religious duty, was rapidly secularized in America...The Poor Belong to Us takes its place as a study and reference work of permanent value. --Patrick Allitt, Books and Culture Reviews of this book: An interesting history of Catholic charitable institutions in the 20th century. The Poor Belong to Us traces the development of Catholic charities from a collection of ill-funded volunteer organizations in the 19th century into the largest private provider of social services in the country. Crisp writing and a keen eye for relevant detail carries the story along nicely...The authors display a deft hand in assembling their material, and impress the reader with their grasp of the large picture as well as the detail. This is a highly readable account of an important element of the history of the Church in America. --Robert Kennedy, National Catholic Register Reviews of this book: This institutional history is valuable for underscoring the importance of the private sector in American welfare and for adding a Catholic dimension to recent welfare scholarship. --S.L. Piott, Choice Reviews of this book: Historian Dorothy Brown and theologian Elizabeth McKeown analyze the evolution of Catholic Churches between the Civil War and World War II from its local volunteer origins to a centralized and professionalized workforce that played a prominent role in the development of the American welfare system that is now under attack. In this fascinating contribution to contemporary welfare scholarship, the authors' study is grounded in concerns and care for the children of the poor. --Dorothy Van Soest, Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare

Download or read book Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching written by Anthony Esolen and published by Sophia Institute Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many claim that Catholic Social Teaching implies the existence of a vast welfare state. In these pages, Anthony Esolen pulls back the curtain on these false philosophers, showing how they’ve undermined the authentic social teachings of the Church in order to neutralize the biggest threat to their plans for secularization — the Catholic Church. With the voluminous writings of Pope Leo XIII as his guide, Esolen explains that Catholic Social Teaching isn’t focused exclusively on serving the poor. Indeed, it offers us a rich treasure of insights about the nature of man, his eternal destiny, the sanctity of marriage, and the important role of the family in building a coherent and harmonious society. Catholic Social Teaching, explains Pope Leo, offers a unified worldview. What the Church says about the family is inextricable from what She says about the poor; and what She says about the Eucharist informs the essence of Her teachings on education, the arts — and even government. You will step away from these pages with a profound understanding of the root causes of the ills that afflict our society, and — thanks to Pope Leo and Anthony Esolen — well equipped to propose compelling remedies for them. Only an authentically Catholic culture provides for a stable and virtuous society that allows Christians to do the real work that can unite rich and poor. We must reclaim Catholic Social Teaching if we are to transform our society into the ideal mapped out by Pope Leo: a land of sinners, yes, but one enriched with love of God and neighbor and sustained by the very heart of the Church’s social teaching: the most holy Eucharist.

Download or read book Catholic Social Teaching and Movements written by Marvin L. Krier Mich and published by Twenty-Third Publications. This book was released on 1998 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introductory book to Catholic social teaching covers not only the official documents and encyclicals but also gives a sense of the movements and people who embodied the struggle for social justice in the last 100 years.

Download or read book The Catholic Challenge to the American Economy written by Thomas M. Gannon and published by Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers. This book was released on 1987 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The African American Church and Welfare Reform written by Harold Dean Trulear and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Catholic Social Teaching and the United States Economy written by John W. Houck and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 1984 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Essays ... first presented and discussed at a major symposium organized by the Center for Ethics and Religious Values in Business of the College of Business Administration of the University of Notre Dame"--Foreword. "Co-published by arrangement with the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Religious Values in Business"--T.p. verso. Includes bibliographies and index.

Download or read book The Pursuit of a Just Social Order written by J. Brian Benestad and published by Ethics & Public Policy Center. This book was released on 1982 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a concise and informative survey of what the U.S. Catholic bishops have said about crucial public issues such as world hunger, nuclear armament, military conscription, conscientious objection, multinational corporations, national health insurance, capital punishment, abortion legislation, and public aid to non-public education. The positions of the bishops are presented and the reasoning behind these positions analyzed. The book is organized into three parts. Part 1 discusses "Religion and Politics in the Catholic Tradition" in two chapters: "Addressing the Political Order" and "Political Principles." Part 2 addresses the bishops' statements on policy issues in chapters entitled "Foreign Policy" and "Domestic Policies." Chapters in Part 3 are "An Evaluation of the Bishops' Quest for Justice" and "Evangelization, Catholic Social Teaching, and Political Philosophy." Appendices include a brief summation on how the bishops make policy statements, the texts of two statements on corrections reform and the energy crisis respectively, and a paper on the approach of the National Catholic Welfare Council to political and social reform. Notes, and an index of names and documents, conclude the volume. (KWL)