RARE "Moral Theologian" John A Ryan Signed 3X5 Card COA For Sale

Up for sale a RARE! "Moral Theologian" John A. Ryan Hand Signed 3X5 Card.  This item is authenticated By Todd

Mueller Autographs and comes with their certificate of authenticity.

ES-989

John Augustine Ryan (1869–1945) was an American Catholic priest who was a noted moral theologian and advocate of social justice. Ryan lived during a decisive moment in the development of Catholic social teaching within the United States. The largest influx of immigrants in America's history, the emancipation of American slaves, and the industrial revolution had produced a new social climate in the early twentieth century, and the Catholic Church faced increasing pressure to take a stance on questions of social reform. Ryan saw the social reform debate of the early twentieth century as essentially an argument between libertarian individualists and collectivists concerned with equality, and thus contended that an emphasis on human welfare framed in natural law theory provided the most promising means to combine conflicting concerns over individual and social welfare Ryan's influential response was the development of a Catholic critique of the American capitalist system that emphasized the existence of absolute natural human rights. While Ryan identified himself primarily as a moral theologian, he also made important contributions to American political life and economic thought. He supported a number of social reforms that were eventually incorporated into the New Deal, and have become elemental to the modern welfare state. Ryan's most well-known contribution to American economic thought was his argument for a minimum wage presented in A Living Wage, a reformulation of his doctoral dissertation. Ryan recognized the importance of a "synergistic relation among scholarship, moral teaching, and political activism," which led to his vigorous application of moral thinking to the political arena. Ryan was born on May 25, 1869, in Vermillion, Minnesota, to William Ryan and Maria[h] Luby. Raised in the Populist tradition on a farm homesteaded by his Irish Catholic parents alongside his ten younger siblings, Ryan's childhood experience with the challenges faced by farmers informed his early investment in economic justice and the role of the Catholic Church in promoting social change. Ryan's interest in moral reflection on contemporary economic issues and empathy for the poor was further cultivated in his early teenage years when Ryan read Henry George's Progress and Poverty. While Ryan later confessed to not fully understanding the book at the time, he cites his first reading of George's work as the beginning of a lifelong commitment to questions of social justice. Ryan attended secondary school at the Christian Brothers School in 1887, and continued his studies at the St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Saint Paul, Minnesota, now named the University of St. Thomas. He graduated valedictorian of his class in 1892. Ryan was a member of the inaugural class at the St. Paul Seminary, now the Saint Paul Seminary School of Divinity, in 1894. Graduating in 1898, Ryan received his holy orders from Archbishop John Ireland of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis. With Ireland's permission, he then moved to Washington, DC, to pursue graduate studies at the Catholic University of America the same year. At the Catholic University of America, Ryan received his licentiate in literature in 1900 and his Doctorate of Sacred Theology in 1906. Ryan saw his own vocation as the teaching of moral theology and economic justice to the American electorate, emphasizing in particular his influence on Catholic voters and politicians. While much of his instruction emerged from the numerous articles and pamphlets he wrote throughout his lifetime, Ryan also held official professorships. He taught moral theology at the St. Paul Seminary from 1902 to 1915, and then returned to Washington where he served as a professor at the Catholic University of America from 1915 until 1939, teaching graduate-level courses in moral theology, industrial ethics, and sociology. During his tenure at the Catholic University of America, Ryan also taught economics and social ethics at Trinity College in Washington, now known as Trinity Washington University. Ryan viewed the separation of economic thought from religious and ethical rules as the root of practical economic problems faced by Americans in the early half of the twentieth century. While at St. Paul Seminary in 1894, Ryan read Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum novarum in which he found Leo's statement that all laborers had a right to adequate worldly goods in order to live in frugal comfort, and the state was obliged to guarantee that right. In 1902, American Catholic Quarterly Review published Ryan's essay, "The Morality of the Aims and Methods of Labor Unions", a piece supportive of unions. Ryan's licentiate dissertation, Some Ethical Aspects of Speculation, investigated the morality of speculation. His Doctor of Sacred Theology dissertation was an influential early economic and moral argument for minimum wage legislation. It was published as A Living Wage in 1906. Ryan insisted in the text that all men had a right to a living wage, adequate to support himself and his family. Always grounding his political thought in moral theology, Ryan argued that Rerum novarum converted the living wage "from an implicit to an explicit principle of Catholic ethics". Published in 1916, Ryan's second major scholarly work was the book Distributive Justice: The Right and Wrong of Our Present Distribution of Wealth, in which he provided an examination of rent from land, interest on capital, profits from enterprise, and wages for labor in relation to moral principles As with A Living Wage, Ryan drew on both ethical and economic reasoning; he claimed that all four agents of production – the worker, entrepreneur, capitalist, and landowner – had a claim to the finished product because each contributed an indispensable element to its production. Ryan further objected at a practical and moral level to both the Puritan industrial ethic and the "gospel of consumption" that encouraged increased consumption through the production of new forms of demand, such as luxury goods and services. Ryan again saw both these flawed economic views as the outcome of a historic separation between ethics and economic life. Ryan based his own vision of economic progress in America on equitable wealth distribution, decreased working hours, and a guaranteed minimum wage. Clear in Ryan's economic thought was a disciplined commitment to both ethical and practical analysis of his country's economic problems. While A Living Wage has achieved a higher degree of recognition, Ryan stated in his autobiography, "Distributive Justice is unquestionably the most important book I have written." In these early publications Ryan staked out an economic position that maintained the primacy of private property but spurned overly acquisitive and unregulated free-market capitalism as economically unhealthy and morally bankrupt. He would argue this economic philosophy for his entire life.