An Ignatian Educator's Response to Supporting Immigrants and RefugeesOur broken immigration system is much more than just a daily headline in the news. It has contributed to injustices that intimately affect people worldwide. From family separation at the U.S. southern border, to the detention and deportation of loved ones, to the widespread challenges that undocumented communities face, immigrants and refugees have repeatedly responded with resilience and resistance.In thi...

Begin a dialogue on racial justice, reconciliation, and transformation.In April of 2017, the Joan and Ralph Lane Center for Catholic Studies and Social Thought at the University of San Francisco sponsored a roundtable discussion on race and incarceration. The event brought together the wisdom of formerly incarcerated activists and leaders with artists, ministers and scholars of various disciplines--law, sociology, theology, critical race theory, and pastoral ministry. Participants i...

Bishop Robert W. McElroy published "A Church for the Poor" in America Magazine on Oct. 21, 2013. Following conversations with colleagues at Santa Clara University, the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University, and Faith in Public Life, the Lane Center pulled together a roundtable of scholars, activists, and religious leaders to meet with Bishop McElroy and discuss how best to support his challenge, engage the Catholic intellectual tradition, and transform the public political co...

2026 Catholic Media Association Third Place Award, Morality and Ethics2026 Catholic Media Association Honorable Mention, Catholic Social Teaching2026 Catholic Media Association Honorable Mention, Pastoral Ministry – Parish LifeA 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...

Through an ethnographically driven study of expressions of sanctuary in San Francisco, Church as Field Hospital constructs an ecclesiology that expands notions of public engagement and sacred space in Christian theology. Sanctuary practices that create spaces for those who have been marginalized—immigrants, refugees, and unhoused people—reflect the field hospital church Pope Francis has envisioned and enacted.This book investigates sanctuary as a way of being church, one m...

The Church in the Modern World: Fifty Years after Gaudium et Spes commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. Featuring scholars from the Joan and Ralph Lane Center for Catholic Studies and Social Thought, this book offers a future-orientated analysis by highlighting contemporary social issues through the lens of Gaudium et Spes. In part I, authors examine the historical, political, and social significance o...

What is unity and how does it serve as a goal for ecumenical dialogue? How can churches, ecumenical organizations, ministers, and theologians effectively approach this goal in the twenty-first century? Sustaining the Hope for Unity offers a methodological reflection on these questions using insights of contemporary critical theory.With particular attention to the work of Jürgen Habermas, the book develops a framework for exchanging religious narratives in a postmodern cont...

The call to make the world a better place is inherent in the Christian belief and practice. But why have efforts to change the world by Christians so often failed or gone tragically awry? And how might Christians in the 21st century live in ways that have integrity with their traditions and are more truly transformative? In To Change the World, James Davison Hunter offers persuasive--and provocative--answers to these questions. Hunter begins with a penetrating appraisal of the mos...

This is a collection of fifteen provocative essays by a cadre of international authors that examine the nature and shape of the Communion today; the colonial legacy; economic tensions and international debt; sexuality and justice; the ecological crisis; violence and healing in South Africa; persecution and religious fundamentalism; the church amid global urbanization; and much more.

This book is a sequel of our first book titled Re-Defining Community published ten years ago by Peter Lang. A good part of this current book is devoted to defining and elaboration on the key concepts, solidarity, subsidiarity and the common good principles. These concepts are essential to the sense of community. The point is that any community is complex and diverse. The only way to ensure harmony in such a setting is to operate in solidarity, a term which entails mutual support and collab...

The True Wealth of Nations arises from the conviction that implementing a morally adequate vision of the economy will generate sustainable prosperity for all. It sets forth the beginnings of an architecture of analysis for relating economic life and Christian faith-intellectually and experientially-and helps social scientists, theologians, and all persons of faith to appreciate the true wealth of any nation.

Church Ethics and Its Organizational Context is the first book to provide a broadly interdisciplinary approach to understanding the leadership crisis in the Catholic Church in the wake of the sex abuse scandal and how it was handled. Well-known scholars, religious clergy, and laymen in the trenches of church formation and leadership come together from the disciplines of organizational behavior, theology, sociology, history, and law, to foster the creation of a new code of ethics that is bo...