Send Lazarus

Contrary to Catholicism, Catholic social teaching, and the commitment to live out the mercy of Jesus Christ, today's dominant global economic and cultural system, neoliberal capitalism, demands that life be led as a series of sacrifices to the market. This book's theological critique of neoliberalism begins with recent papal teaching against "economism," proceeds into a historical and theoretical analysis of neoliberalism's rise to global prominence through class warfare, its subtle redefining of human self-understanding via the notion of "human capital," and its formation of an ethos of mercilessness. Central is treatment of four neoliberal-perpetuated and -exacerbated crises: environmental destruction, slum proliferation, mass incarceration, and mass deportation. This entails plumbing the sacrificial and racist depths of neoliberalism. The book offers an antineoliberal systematic theology founded on Trinitarian mercy, a neighbor anthropology and innkeeper ecclesiology, and a politics of mercy, or a civilizational program grounded in yet reimagining the traditional Catholic works of mercy. This coheres with a "playbook" for social transformation that uses the universal destination of goods and abolitionism to direct the corporal works of mercy against the neoliberal utopianism that brought enhanced ecological devastation, slum growth, mass imprisonment, and abuse of migrants. In concert with official Catholic teaching, the Gospel injunction to "be merciful," and hopeful visions of various people of good will, Send Lazarus urges a robust antineoliberal and antiracist politics, which amounts to a Catholic hope for abundant life.