God, Poverty, and the Right to Human Development

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Gustavo Gutiérrez famously posed a fundamental question for theological inquiry: how can we talk about God in the face of crushing poverty that leads to death? This course explores that foundational question through an examination of biblical perspectives on poverty, early Christian understandings of poverty, and contemporary theological and social scientific analyses and responses to poverty. The contemporary portion of the course tracks and draws on the earlier Christian tradition and its developments in Catholic Social Teaching, putting these sources into critical dialogue with recent social scientific studies of poverty, its causes, and policy solutions.