Preaching Justice
Dominican Contributions to Social Ethics in the Twentieth Century
Preaching Justice covers the work of over 30 individual Dominicans, friars and laity, across the troubled period of the 20th Century.
Ranging from friars who went down the mines in the early 1900s, through, Dominican artists who developed radical social aesthetics, to a friar, Dominique (Georges) Pire, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1958... and on to those who resisted totalitarian communism in Eastern Europe, military dictatorship in Brazil, and structural sin in South Africa... as well as major social theorists, like: Arthur Utz, Louis-Joseph Lebret, and M. Albert Krąpiec.
The Dominicans discussed here were deeply involved in all the major political and socio-economic issues of their day. Many of them saw in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas the basic philosophical building blocks for a good and open society and devoted themselves to the building of that society.
Looking back at their contribution from the perspective of the early years of the 21st century, we can recognise the continuing validity of their approach:
a contextualised social ethics, sensitive to historical conditions,while recognising the universal validity of basic ethical categories including human rights, the dignity of the person and the common good.
Like all histories, this book is just as much about the present as it is about the past – through examining the lives, examples and writings of these Dominicans, many of them pioneers in their fields, we too may gain insight into those issues and theoretical problems that demand our attention today.
