This chapter begins with the origins of "social justice," a term that emerged among Jesuits in the 1840s and ’50s and then infused the Catholic workers’ movements and social teaching of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. American essayists and activists have used the essay to persuade readers of the productive overlap of two utopian systems: Christianity and (democratic) socialism. This chapter explores five thinkers – Eugene V. Debs, Helen Keller, Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day, and Cornel West – who have been particularly prolific essayists, writing fluently and frequently about social justice in the earliest sense of the word. By recalling the earliest context of the term social justice, this chapter adds another dimension to contemporary debates on everything from Black struggle to economic inequality, from climate justice to equitable representation at all levels of government. The essay form allowed the writers studied in this chapter to articulate in a variety of styles, from the lyrical to the vociferous, the pedagogical to the morally urgent, the need for a compassionate understanding of human wretchedness in an industrialized world bent on breaking the worker.

This chapter begins with an essay of David Tracy’s from 1991 that celebrates how feminist thinkers insist on contextualising all thought and experience while still pressing universal demands for justice. Many feminist theologians then add further religious layers of material contextualisation and theocentric universalisation, rendering their work, in Tracy’s eyes, ‘the unexampled challenge’ for all theology. Bingemer’s own Roman Catholic feminism is related to liberation theology and its ‘option for the poor’ in a Latin American continent where women often find themselves ‘doubly poor’. Tracy’s favoured selection of European women mystics– from Angela of Foligno to Madame Jeanne de Guyon– are explored as practising and contemplating, in Tracy’s expression, a divine–human ‘excessive love’, for God and often also the poor. Finally, the essay draws Dorothy Day and Simone Weil– two remarkable twentieth-century women valued by Tracy and yet placed by many outside the canons of feminism– to the side of more recent theological feminism, for the hope for a church and a future in which divine–human love and desire for justice challenges patriarchy, sexism, and all oppressions of the poor.

One of the many fascinating ironies about the 1930s and 1940s is the prevailing assumption in the west that the world was secular, even while Christian thinkers and theologians played prominent public roles and incorporated Christian ethics into their world views. Christians during the period sometimes saw themselves as the beleaguered other and other times embraced “secular” norms of social and political interaction as integral to their Christian ethics. These norms were embodied in movements ranging from communism and anti-imperialism to rampant bureaucratization and militarization. Many British and US (if not French) elites, including government leaders, academics, and the new legal professionals, came from a Christian formation, and scholars are recovering the ethical, including religious, formations of influential figures such as Herbert Butterfield, Norman Angel, and Arnold Toynbee, precursors of the contemporary English School.1 John Foster Dulles’s religious world view and its influence on the Commission for a Just and Durable Peace, Reinhold Niebuhr’s political theology and its foundational role in postwar international relations theory, and Jacques Maritain’s infusion of Christian personalism into transnational human rights all had theoretical and policy repercussions far beyond national boundaries. Other Christian activists and theologians – including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, A. J. Muste, Simone Weil, and the religious writers of the Harlem Renaissance – created lasting legacies on the ethics of addressing not only violence but also poverty, class, and race. As a result, they also need to be included in the Christian/IR/ethical pantheon of this era.