Poverty, Injustice, and Inequality as Challenges for Christian Humanism

Both in religious and in secular culture there is an acute awareness that poverty, destitution, and misery should be eliminated, and that it is possible to achieve this goal. Despite this common aim, strategies for fighting poverty vary widely among the disciplines. This book interprets poverty in the light of Christian faith and ventures beyond the dual public-private model. Pope Francis has called on business leaders around the world to spread a new mindset in business that acknowledges the poor and the marginalized. In doing so, he deplores inequality and injustice. These concepts pose an intellectual challenge to Christian humanism, which the authors, leading scholars on the subject, take up. The book opens with a series of chapters on the economic dimensions of poverty, inequality, and injustice, and turns to the philosophical and theological aspects in its second part. Even though rigorously academic, the ideas in this book are transformative. The social market economy places the human person at the center of the economy, and it offers a model that can be implemented, under this or other names, in many parts of the world.