CREDO has a monthly virtual seminar! It takes place every first Friday of the month at 10 am EST and explores issues at the intersection of economics and Catholic Social Thought. You can find the program and more information here. If you are interested and want to attend, please send an e-mail to the organizer, Andy Yuengert of Pepperdine University, andrew.yuengert@pepperdine.edu. And of course, if you have a paper you want to present, do get in touch with Andy.
Announcing the first session
The first session of the workshop will take place on September 10 at 10 EST. Andrew Yuengert will present on Catholic Social Teaching and Economics in Dialog: The Problem of Virtue, which can be downloaded from here.
There is an economic literature on ‘virtue’, and Catholic Social Teaching speaks a lot about ‘virtue’, but does ‘virtue’ mean the same thing in economics as it does in CST? The paper provides a framework for comparing the two terms, argues that economics has great difficulty in capturing what CST means by ‘virtue’, and briefly discusses what can be done about the difficulty.
More about the speaker
In order to get to know better the speakers, we sent some questions to him. Here are the answers.
Q1. Andrew, you begun life as a labor economist, but have written extensively about Catholic Social Thought. Can you tell us briefly how you became interested enough in the topic to make it a central part of your professional life?
Ever since I was an undergraduate in the early 1980s (when the US bishops were writing about economics) I have been interested in the economics/CST dialog and its challenges. My love for economics, and the advice of the economists who taught me, convinced me that I could offer more as an economist who tried to say something interesting about CST than I could as a theologian who tried to say something interesting about economics. The challenge has always been to keep from embarrassing myself on the philosophy and theology, while maintaining ties to economics and economists.
Q2. What is your favorite papal encyclical, among all those who helped build Catholic Social Thought?
John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, sums up the challenges of CST for economists: it acknowledges the attraction of markets while offering a deep critique of them, and insisting on the cultural and political pre-requisites.
Q3. Many CREDO members are not very familiar with Catholic Social Thought. Can you give one or two references of books with would provide a good introduction for professional economists?
This is a great question; my difficulty in answering it indicates that there is a need for an introduction to CST specifically for economists. Aside from reading the encyclicals themselves (and attending the annual CREDO economics/CST workshop for economists!), I would suggest Dan Finn’s “The Moral Ecology of Markets,” and Mary Hirschfeld’s “Aquinas and the Market.”
