Patricia Ranft, Professor of History, emerita, at Central Michigan University, deepens our modern understanding of work by taking us back to its medieval origins in The Theology of Work: Peter Damian and the Medieval Religious Renewal Movement. Historians have traditionally located an emerging theory of work in the 19th and 20th centuries, but Ranft’s engaging study turns back the time clock to show that medieval society established the framework from which modern ideas on work have grown. Ranft regards the religion and labor debate begins in the 11th century world …
The first of the Catholic Church’s social encyclicals, Rerum novarum (The Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor) was issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. The document is a response to the early Industrial Revolution and its effects on the inhumane treatment of the working poor, and the looming threat of Marxist revolution. Leo rejects Marxism for a non-violent social reform to insure worker’s rights based on the dignity of the worker and his share in the economic and social progress of the modern industrialized world. Rerun novarum lays …
This dialogue proposes that work and human flourishing is the signature faith in the public square issue of our time. Just as the search for racial justice and equality attracted diverse religious leaders to march alongside African American activists during the civil rights movement, religions are again summoned back to the public square. The present call is for Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and other sacred traditions, to think aloud theologically about the contemporary crisis of work. Present structural changes in the U.S. labor market, ushered in by economic, global and …