Reading Patristic Texts on Social Ethics: Issues and Challenges for Twenty-First-Century Christian Social Thought. Edited by JOHAN LEEMANS, BRIAN J. MATZ, and JOHAN VERSTRAETEN.

Abstract

This volume of 12 essays is the second in a projected series of four publications emerging from a recent research project into the ‘potential for a dialogue between the Church Fathers and Catholic social thought’ organized by the Centre for Catholic Social Thought at Leuven (p. vii). The book takes as its starting-point the recognition that much Catholic Social Teaching (CST) as it has developed from the late nineteenth century onwards draws upon a limited range of patristic texts in a manner which strips citations of their context and manipulates them with scant regard for the complexities of either the texts themselves or the social issues which they addressed. The volume, and the conference upon which it is based, ask whether the past, when specified in its detailed particularity, can fruitfully inform future CST. After the introduction, the essays are grouped into four sections: approaches, contexts, themes, and concluding reflections.