Description: Fulfilling what he has called a "grave responsibility," Pope Francis has often addressed the issue of economic inequality and the use of personal, corporate, and national wealth. Francis's teaching is rooted in the teaching of Jesus, preserved in the pages of the New Testament. The Bible has more to say about the use of wealth than it does about other moral issues of our day, yet this teaching seldom enters into the conscience of believers. In Wealth, Wages, and the Wealthy: New Testament Insight for Preachers and Teachers Fr. Raymond F. Collins redresses this issue and provides the reader with a careful examination not only of what Jesus said about wealth but also of what each of the New Testament authors wrote about the topic.
Brief description:
Raymond F. Collins is a Roman Catholic priest and a New Testament scholar. Most of his academic career was spent at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, the world's oldest Catholic university, and at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, where he taught and served as the dean of the School of Religious Studies. Among his twenty books are major commentaries on Paul's First and Second Letters to the Corinthians and the Pastoral Epistles, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus.
Review Quotes: "Collins has opened doors in the Scriptures that reveal texts that are rarely explored, and even more rarely, explored fully and together. Yet these texts are central to Jesus' teachings. Living as we do in a culture dominated by greed, it is countercultural to be consistently generous, and, even more so, to be radically generous, but that is precisely the lifestyle to which the Gospel calls us. Collins presents each of these texts, explains their meaning in the historical context in which they were first produced, and briefly, at the end of each chapter, exposes our deafness. The Gospel has the power to transform us, and Collins' exegetical study can help to facilitate that transformation. Every Roman Catholic, every Christian, should read this book."Alice L. Laffey, Professor Emerita, College of the Holy Cross