Not as the World Gives

This is the time for a new politics, a new economics. Not As the World Gives, drawing on the Church's two millennia of reflection on the Gospel, especially in the encyclicals from Rerum Novarum to Centesimus Annus, shows us the nature of society by showing us ourselves. We are beings created to give and receive -- called to "walk towards the true freedom that Christ taught us in the Beatitudes," as Pope Francis expressed it. There is no peace without justice, but neither can there be justice without love. Far from being an impractical dream, Catholic social doctrine can transform the way we work, the way we govern, and the way we treat the natural world. What emerges from this sequel to the author's The Radiance of Being is a vision of integration and wholeness, a society both divine and human, and a "humanism open to the absolute."