Radical Sufficiency: Work, Livelihood, and a US Catholic Economic Ethic

Rethinking the means through which we can achieve economic well-being for all.

In this timely book, Christine Firer Hinze looks back at the influential teachings of priest-economist Monsignor John A. Ryan (1869-1945), 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 entwines 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.

Radical Sufficiency offers transformative strategies and strategic policy directions for achieving the radical Christian goal of dignified work and a good livelihood for all.

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.