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A useful and enriching resource for empowering organizers rooted in Catholic Social Thought to engage the church on all levels and mobilize Catholics and other people of faith to enact social change.
Empowering People through Encounter presents the Catholic Social Tradition as an embodied, practical, and inspiring way to connect faith and action. It highlights the dispositions, skills, and methods of faith-based community organizing through a combination of interviews with Catholic organizers in the field and case studies of campaigns from a variety of national contexts. Focusing on the relational praxis of organizing provides an opportunity for readers to encounter Catholic Social Thought as an integrated vision that gets lived on the ground by those closest to the pain of injustices rather than a set of abstract principles invoked by those at a distance.
Students and practitioners of Catholic Social Thought in a variety of contexts—from the classroom and the pulpit to the one-to-one meeting and the public action—will appreciate the introduction to the concrete skills of community organizing to encounter the Catholic Social Tradition with particular emphasis on the social teachings and synodal vision of Pope Francis. For those who use this resource, within the context of a university classroom or parish, Empowering People through Encounter will nourish faith formation and vocation development by presenting community organizing as an expression of Catholic Social Thought and a way people of faith have been architects of Catholicism.
Erin Brigham directs the Joan and Ralph Lane Center for Catholic Social Thought and the Ignatian Tradition and teaches in the department of theology and religious studies at the University of San Francisco. She also directs the St. Ignatius Institute, a living-learning community rooted in academics, spirituality, and solidarity. Her books include Sustaining the Hope for Unity: Ecumenical Dialogue in a Postmodern World (Liturgical Press, 2012) and Church as Field Hospital: Toward an Ecclesiology of Sanctuary (Liturgical Press, 2021). She grew up in the Rocky Mountains of Western Montana and now lives in the Richmond District with her family.
Maureen H. O’Connell taught for eight years in the theology department at Fordham University before serving as a professor of Christian ethics at La Salle University in Philadelphia. She is the author of three books including If These Walls Could Talk: Community Muralism and the Beauty of Justice (Liturgical Press, 2012). She is on the board of the Society for the Arts in Religious and Theological Studies and is a member of St. Vincent De Paul parish in Germantown, where she is also a member of POWER (Philadelphians Organizing to Witness, Empower, and Rebuild). She holds a BA in history from Saint Joseph’s University and a PhD in theological ethics from Boston College.
