Working Alternatives: American Catholic Experiments in Work and Economy flows from “Building Good Economies: Interdisciplinary and Practical Perspectives,” a 2016 conference held at Fordham University. This conference commemorated the 125th anniversary of the advent of modern Catholic social teaching (CST) with Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum and sought to foster interdisciplinary conversations around economies that are inclusive, people-serving, and sustainable. Within the volume itself, there are numerous references to bedrock CST principles: the universal destination of all goods, the dignity of work and the rights of workers, integral human development, solidarity with a preferential option for the poor. Sadly, the very articulation of these principles “suggest the dominance of their opposites, the established systems they seek to replace” (6). Different experiments in this volume suggest what that might look like in practice. The essays are organized around Fr. Joseph Cardijn's traditional see-judge-act framework for advancing the church's mission in the world: “Seeing Differently: Alternative Visions of Economy and Work,” “Valuing Differently: Challenging Work and Business as Usual,” and “Practicing Differently: Creating Alternative Ways of Working.”
The essays cover a diverse swath of economic and social questions. Sandra Sullivan-Dunbar looks at the care economy (an oft-overlooked economic activity that is starting to receive much-needed attention because of the pandemic) in the light of Pope Benedict XVI's Caritas in Veritate. Michael Naughton brings integral ecology, one of the latest developments in CST, into dialogue with contemporary business practices. Nicholas Rademacher lifts Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day (and the Rule of Saint Benedict) as a way to promote the creation of alternative cultures of “reducing consumption, promoting sustainable agriculture, and integrating prayer and work” (90). Gerald Beyer suggests that elements of Catholic social teaching could be a balm for the rapidly corporatizing ethos of higher education in the United States today. His work also raises uncomfortable questions about Catholic institutions of higher education that are failing to live Catholic social teaching, which is often mentioned in their mission statements and curricula.
One particularly engaging aspect of this volume is its final section, the “act” portion of the see-judge-act paradigm. Several experiments in alternative models of work are recounted. Kathleen Holscher recounts the work of the Medical Mission Sisters in the 1940s to train nurse-midwives to serve poor Mexican families in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico. Alison Collis Greene describes the work of the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen to set up interracial work camps in Appalachian communities in the mid-twentieth century. Perhaps this volume could have benefited from more extensive engagement with issues of immigration and race on the question of building inclusive economies.
Working Alternatives is a fine statement of issues in contemporary Catholic social teaching 125 years after Rerum Novarum. The editors describe the volume as “a body of work within which Catholic forms of engaging with economic questions come into conversation with one another and with non-Catholic experiments in economic thought and practice” (5). The book delivers on what it promises. In a classroom environment, essays from this volume could be profitably paired with different magisterial documents from modern CST to illustrate examples of what the theory might look like in practice. Hopefully this volume will promote other experiments in building just economies.
