Empowering People through Encounter: Catholic Social Teaching and Community Organizing

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.