ABSTRACT
After two decades of research on religion and development, and of partnerships between development organizations and faith communities, work is still at an incipient stage on what could be learned from religions about their own understandings of development and social change. At a time when the opportunity for effective action against climate change narrows, and when a global pandemic has revealed the human costs of the degradation of animal habitats, we can no longer avoid considering deep existential questions about how we are to live together in a common home. In this context we may also ask how development theory and practice can benefit from greater engagement with sources of wisdom coming from religious traditions and their perspectives on how we are to live, relate to others and to nature, and move into the future as a society. This book brings two conversation partners into dialogue: the human development school of thought underpinned by Amartya Sen’s capability approach to development, on the one hand, and the Catholic social tradition, on the other.
