We do have an urgent practical need to rediscover, reassert, and enact more fully our old lost awareness that God’s delicate creation is a good and holy thing.
Maybe it is here that my experience of trying to be a farmer and living “on the land” taught me the most about what salvation and living the Gospel truly means.
Alongside the staggering achievements in production values, stands the more sobering statistics concerning the social goods of American agricultural life.
Retrieving a Catholic theology of creation may finally give us grounds for hope in some of the most vexing matters facing us today.
Hamlin and McGreevy are among the few to have noticed that there was an effort to bring Catholic intellectual tradition to bear upon Catholic rural life.
It is not so much a matter of Adam Smith “defending” capitalism as it is of capitalists appropriating Smith, and often against his expressed wishes.
As Industrialization took hold of the rural countryside, the family farm became a way of the past.