Mumford on the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture's Conference on Poverty

I am late posting about this, but the recent conference at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, "Your Light Will Rise in the Darkness: Responding to the Cry of the Poor," was a superb event that reflected the best thinking from a range of disciplines on the issue of poverty. The keynote addresses by Nobel Laureate James Hickman, Alasdair MacIntyre, John Finnis, and Gerhard Cardinal Müller were rich in insights from economics, philosophy, and theology, as were the breakout sessions. I can do no better than this summary from James Mumford (University of Virginia Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture). A bit from Mumford's conclusion:

One lasting impression of Notre Dame’s “Your Light Will Rise” conference was the way that Catholic social teaching—from Leo XIII’s famous encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) onwards—defies the left-right axis. Thus, in interview Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, could on one hand speak of the necessity of “facing head-on the effects of a system that places profit at its center,” while on the other emphasizing that Pope Francis’s conception of poverty “[goes well] beyond a merely economic conception of poverty.” For his part, Patrick Deneen, the political thinker who shone in the debate that closed the conference, came at capitalism from a conservative standpoint, lamenting, among other things the loss of tradition and the anonymity of markets.

This defiance of the left-right axis, so clearly on view in Notre Dame last week, suggests not only why Catholic social thought has so much further to run. It also suggests why, given how fed up a growing part of the electorate is with the level of political polarization, Catholic social thought should be increasingly heard.