Those of us in the academy who spend some or most of our time teaching undergraduates about Catholic Social Teaching (CST) must sometimes wonder how to make these dry bones live. I know I do. The ideas are so important, although the documents that enshrine them are not written with late adolescents in mind. It can be an uphill task, but with Anna Rowlands’ new book, everything is “changed, changed utterly,” in the words if not the context of Yeats’ great poem. Though Yeats' poem commemorated revolutionary activity, so the parallel can be considered apposite because Rowlands seems to me in this book to be turning the study of CST on its head, to its great benefit.

The novelty of this book is clear in several ways: there is extensive historical background, a dialogue with secular thought, a more varied palette of texts than simply the canonical encyclicals of CST, and a profound appreciation tempered by sober critique. In other words, the reader will look in vain for the usual approach, a stolid march through Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, Mater et Magistra, and the rest, highlighting worker's rights, guilds, economic rights, subsidiarity, solidarity, and so on. All of the documents and all of the major themes are present, of course, but here they are handled in a distinctly different way.

Rowlands’ book begins in a dialogue with Hannah Arendt's Men in Dark Times, and the surprising attention Arendt gave to John XIII. She then sketches the background to modern CST in three encyclical letters of Pius XI, an unusual but illuminating choice. A chapter on “philosophical and theological trajectories” rightly singles out Joseph Ratzinger's trinitarian anthropology in which the person is identified as “an event of relativity.” The book continues with lengthy discussions of human dignity with special reference to migration and structural sin and follows this with three lengthy chapters on the idea of the common good, one of which does a deep dive into patristic and medieval thinking. The final chapters of the book explore the way in which CST understands the political community (not so commonly foregrounded in CST-talk), and subsidiarity and solidarity (old favorites).

Allow me to use the chapters on the common good to stand for the richness and complexity of the treatment of all themes mentioned previously. The phrase “the common good,” trips off the tongue so easily, and yet its history is anything but obvious. Rowlands devotes sixty pages, or about one-fifth of the book, to a close examination of the concept. She begins with a consideration of several theorists of the common good, including the Spanish political philosopher Iñigo Errejón, Chantal Mouffe, Michael Sandel, Noam Chomsky, and especially Josef Pieper, whose “theological metaphysics of the good” carries us forward into a chapter on the patristic and medieval context, followed by one on the encyclical tradition, which rightly culminates with Pope Francis' reading of the critical role of the preferential option for the poor. Here, perhaps, is my lone caveat with Rowlands’ discussion. The one thing missing, which might have been triggered by talk of the preferential option, is the contribution of the ancient Hebrew prophets to thinking about the common good. Amos’ judgment on Israel is evidently an attempt to reassert the notion of the common good essential to covenant faithfulness.

This is probably not a book for undergraduates, unless they are particularly sophisticated. But it is an excellent choice for a graduate class and even more important for someone planning to teach CST to undergraduates. What Rowlands has done for teachers is to give them a chance to get behind the words of the encyclicals and even further away from the soundbite approach that is too easy to adopt. Her work provides historical and sociological context, truly building a deeper understanding of CST while not falling into the trap of idealizing it. The three chapters on the common good end, for example, with several pages headed “loose ends and room for further development.” Kudos to Anna Rowlands, and thanks for making teaching CST both easier and better.