Dear Colleagues,

I invite you to contribute an article using the contributions of and your insights vis à vis Catholic Social Ethics for a Special Issue of the journal Religions, with a focus on work engaging pressing issues in our diverse contemporary settings. The scope of the volume will retrieve the past (perhaps early Church authors, medieval, and modern), evaluate the 20^th–21^st centuries’ papal encyclicals, and explore the contributions of our guild members to examine responses to the critical issues of today and those foreseen. The purpose of this Special Issue is to bring a historical-critical methodology to the perplexing issues of our time through the lens of Catholic Social Ethics.

• Focus, Scope, and Purpose

The overall focus of this Special Issue of Religions is an examination of perplexing critical issues encountered in today’s world. Many of these issues concern persons who are marginalized, persons living in harm’s way (e.g., climate disaster; war and threats of war; food, housing and health insecurity; poverty; and ethnic, racial, and gender discrimination), and persons overlooked or hidden from the main. Your contributions will consider these concerns through the lens of Catholic Social Ethics, supported by the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching.

The scope of this Special Issue is global, recognizing overlapping effects of crises and victories. However, the local and immediate needs of individuals must be identified by facts and figures for interventions and mitigation efforts to be successful. Thus, contributors are asked to examine and interrogate the local realities of crises.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to call attention to the ways that the Catholic tradition supports efforts to both name and relieve suffering with words of solace, calls for action, and proposals for strategies and ways to do so per the insights of theological and magisterial teachings.

• A Contemporary Supplement to the Literature

This volume of Religions offers an opportunity to keep the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching relevant to the Church and the world by examining the needs of people at the precipice of crisis. If critical ethical issues are “anything”, they are a call to us, as Catholic theological ethicists, to identify, unpack, and strategize about how the tradition offers insights on how we, the Church, and we, theologians, may respond with words of hope and strategies for change. This volume invites us as well to consider what Pope Francis encourages a “culture of encounter” that moves us from our cubicles to accompaniment in the chaos of the contemporary world such that our efforts may better bring succor and critical ethical insight to the pressing issues of our times and for all people.

A number of single authors have written about critical ethical issues, many concerning the “hot” topics of abortion/euthanasia, business and medical malfeasance, discrimination, fraud/theft, sexual morality, etc. The Journal of Catholic Social Thought (JCST) covers much of the same sources as the authors in this Special Issue of Religions will. However, the distinction between this Special Issue and the work found in JCST is the specific attention to ethics. The Journal of Moral Theology includes a number of articles on critical issues and occasionally hosts a themed issue, but none of the themed issues have focused explicitly on critical ethical issues.

This volume offers a unique opportunity, not unlike the opportunities we find in the Catholic Theological Ethics book series sponsored by Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church. The difference from CTEWC collections is that this Special Issue of Religions offers our work to readers in the Catholic, other Christian, and other faith traditions as subscribers to Religions. An added bonus—this volume gives us another opportunity to collaborate and strengthen our commitments to faith seeking justice.

Prof. Dr. Mary Jo Iozzio
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Catholic Social Teaching
• theological ethics
• critical ethical issues
• call to action
• care for creation
• culture of encounter
• human dignity
• participation
• option for the poor and vulnerable
• rights and responsibilities
• solidarity
• subsidiarity
• work