Upcoming Discussion Dates: Catholic Social Teaching, and Neil Postman

Also! A Brief Preview of the Next Two Months

As I retreat into the woods this week, a preview of some dates and things to come.

Upcoming Catholic Social Teaching Session

The first of the Catholic Social Teaching sessions with

Sarah Carter

of Recovering Catholic went really well! We covered Rerum Novarum, the first major document of the modern era which set the stage for the 20th century tradition of Catholic moral reasoning.

The next one up is June 23rd, at 6:30 p.m. on Monday night. We’ll be covering Pacem in Terris, available online here. Zoom link for Monday is at the end.

Again, these are open to anyone to participate in! So, please read along, and come jump in with us.

Upcoming Neil Postman Reading Group!

The first session, on part one of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, went really well also. Postman raises a lot of prescient questions for a disorienting age of infotainment. The next session will be on June 30th, at 6:30 p.m., on Monday night.

This one is for supporting subscribers. I’ll be sending out the link closer in to the date.

Coming Up Soon

One of the consistent threads of this newsletter is the Christian moral life, and how it intersects with the concerns of churches. As such, I’m going to be picking up two threads for the rest of the summer:

1. Scarcity and the moral life. I begin sketching out some bones for what I believe will be my next major book project, there’s a lot of thinking out loud that I’m going to be doing. How do we name the various kinds of scarcity—natural and imposed? What if the problem isn’t only that goods are distributed unevenly? What are the ways that scarcity marks how live in the world, with respect to politics, conceptions of the self, education, church priorities? And most importantly—if scarcity just is a feature of the world—how do we live in it well?

There are topics that are much sexier that lots of people write on, and that I’ve spent a lot of time writing on: war, immigration, politics. But scarcity is a third-rail kind of topic: so much of our world is built on the presumption that we’ll always have enough, fishes-and-loaves-as-public-policy kind of thinking.

To just keep answering questions, to keep banging on about policies, misses the elephant in the room: so much of our lives is built on actually avoiding the reality that there isn’t always enough. It’s a more unsettling possibility, morally and theologically, and one we need to get more comfortable with, and more clear about.

We are in an age of declining church resources, declining numbers of ministers, pressures of time on volunteers. The fact that we are coming off of a season of abundance in all these things may make us think that abundance was always the rule, but I think, as indicated last week, this bundles together some things which have not been traveling companions in our moral imaginations.

I’ll begin teasing this out, as well as the implications for church practice, over the next few months. This is part of a larger project which I’ll have more to say about in the months to come, but not yet.

Behold! Exhibit A: we have here a perverse kind of hope, which overreaches beyond scarcity, as opposed to seeing hope as what we while scarcity is yet here. What is the resurrection if not the establishing of life everlasting with wounds in the body?

2. Great Books for the Moral Life. One of the major questions that is always brought up is “Where do I start?” Beginning in July, I’m going to start offering a periodic book capsule of some major places to start. In the past, I’ve done slow walks through several of these, and will pick this up in earnest.

Part of the work of a teacher is to help others to think with particular works, and it’s hard to think with people you’ve never met. So, think of these as a kind of matchmaking service. It won’t be true love every time, but hopefully, it’ll bring out the right kind of provocations. Each of these will be, again, with an eye toward the moral life of the church.

Looking forward to the months to come. But first, I’m heading to the woods for a week. See you next Monday, for our time with Pacem in Terris!

Zoom Link for Pacem In Terris

Myles Werntz is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Pacem in Terris

Time: Jun 23, 2025 06:30 PM Central Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting

https://acu-edu.zoom.us/j/97030693570?pwd=jpX4BaGov9aw4LgJVDdSG6BdXbRRkC.1

Meeting ID: 970 3069 3570

Passcode: 163519

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