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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Kevin E. Schmiesing. Within the Market Strife: American Catholic Economic Thought from Rerum Novarum to Vatican II. (Studies in Ethics and Economics.) Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books. 2004. Pp. xv, 185. Cloth $75.00, paper $19.95.
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| Kevin E. Schmiesing's brief analytical survey of American Catholic economic thought belongs to a growing body of literature recognizing Catholicism's longstanding engagement with questions of social and economic order. Many of these studies, including this one, see such perspectives as important not only for Catholics but for American society at large. |
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Like almost all histories of modern Catholic engagement with social and economic questions, Schmiesing begins (after a brief nod to the early republic) with the impact of Pope Leo XIII's pioneering encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891). Schmiesing emphasizes the "ambivalence" with which Catholic thinkers regarded the prevalent American Progressive-era social gospel and "post-religious" economics that emerged at the same time as the pope's declaration. Most Catholic economic writers favored some kinds of "reform" but argued—often in a neo-scholastic language that pragmatic American reformers ignored or scorned—that economics must be located within a larger account of human purpose and well-being. |
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