Based on roundtable discussions by a variety of scholars over a two-year period, these essays explore the complex and often contradictory matrix of sentiments, feelings, and beliefs that frame America's contemporary social doctrine of wealth. The seven Boston College faculty members whose writings comprise this volume are professors of classics, economics, ethics, history, literature, scripture, and sociology. Each scholar reviews a a range of writings and narratives that enunciate definite theses about the genesis and prospects as well as the uses and abuses of wealth. Today, as the...

Wealth and the Will of God looks at some of the spiritual resources of the Christian tradition that can aid serious reflection on wealth and giving. Beginning with Aristotle--who is crucial for understanding later Christian thought--the book discusses Aquinas, Ignatius, Luther, Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards. Though the ideas vary greatly, the chapters are organized to facilitate comparisons among these thinkers on issues of ultimate purposes or aspirations of human life; on the penultimate purposes of love, charity, friendship, and care; on the resources available to human beings in this...

There is fascination and suspicion about the wealthy. Yet there is a dearth of material in which the wealthy speak for themselves about the meaning of their lives. "Gospels of Wealth" provides such narrative material. This book is a novel venture in social science. It is the first book to have a broad range of wealthy individuals recount their lives in detail, and, importantly, the first to formulate a sociology of wealth that goes beyond conventional, power-elite, Marxist, and status-group theories.

The authors begin with an analytical framework for studying the biographical narratives...