Karen House Catholic Worker |
The RoundTable Winter 2010 Distributism: Putting a Human Face on the Economy (In the spirit of Distributism, please check out our new page on responsible consuming! It includes a list of worker-owned cooperatives, Fair Trade sources for food and clothing, and a list of St. Louis based cooperatives!) Major Articles
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Regular Features
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Why This Issue More often than not, when we sit down together to discuss what the next issue of the Roundtable should be, we begin to brainstorm and soon enough an idea starts to form. The idea begins to takes on a life of its own and it becomes obvious why this is the issue we should be writing. Things begin to fall into place and pretty soon we have the whole issue planned out. That was not the case with this issue on distributism. We brainstormed for a long time and once or twice almost had a different issue planned. However, we kept coming back to the question of what do we need to say right now, what is the root of the problems we see around us? If you look back at several of our recent issues there is a common theme woven through all of them. It may have been difficult for us to see, and I fear it may be difficult for you to read, but the truth we have come to is that capitalism and the influence it has over our society is breeding the worst of the world’s problems. We have mentioned it many times in recent issues, and it became clear that we also needed to address capitalism head on. We didn’t want to write a whole issue on why capitalism is bad though; we already touched on that through immigration, the criminal justice system, elections, and even our food system. We wanted to give something positive as an alternative. Standing on our soapbox and preaching why something is bad doesn’t make anything good, and so we set out to offer an alternative to capitalism that we as Catholic Workers could support. Luckily, we didn’t have to look far as the Catholic Worker has been talking about distributism for years, and many of the roots of distributism are found within the teachings of the Catholic Church.
Carolyn also wrote this issue’s Catholic Worker Thought and Action on Personalism. Tim Pekarek wrote From Karen House, Robert McGee wrote From TC House, and Colleen Kelly created this issue's centerfold.
It isn’t offering any new housing or even new jobs it seems, and so we are speaking the truth that there is another way. "Why this issue?" Because we want the suffering to end; we want the people we see to have dignity again and so we offer distributism as an alternative. - Timmy Cosentino |
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