This seminar considers the relation of economic thought to religious ethics, focusing particularly on the relation of modern capitalism to Christian social thought. There are two basic questions for our inquiry: What role can and should moral judgements play in market relationships? And: What sort of moral judgements arise from theological commitments, with what practical implications? To test those questions, the seminar opens and closes with the basic economic problem of impoverishment. If our inquiry is productive, the seminar should improve our understanding of the possibilities, obligations, and difficulties in responding.

The seminar opens by framing the most basic form of economic scarcity – hunger – within recent conditions of global economic development and planetary ecological stress, in order to ask: how do classical reflections on justice and ancient Christian imperatives to love address contemporary economic relations? Answering that question requires considering of the relation of ethics to economics, so we spend two weeks on basic moral assumptions of the market system. Then we turn to an overview of major theological responses to modern economic relations. That, in turn, raises questions about the relation of religion and capitalism. We close by returning to the opening case of impoverishment, in anticipation of constructive accounts for the role for ethical judgements in economic life.