Book excerpt: A Solution for Our Social and Economic Crisis In 1891, Pope Leo XIII wrote the groundbreaking encyclical Rerum Novarum, which featured the Catholic Church's response to the conditions of the working classes and unleashed modern Catholic social thought. Inspired by Leo's call for the law to "induce as many as possible of the people to become owners," famed writers G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc crafted an alternative against the dispossession caused by the monopolizing ends of socialism and capitalism, which come at the expense of justice, the common good, and our natural resources. In a world obsessed with growth and globalization, Distributism is a political economy championing the sustainability of decentralized, local economies with the aim of ensuring the widest ownership of the means of production. The solution to our present socio-economic malaise is an economy as if people and God mattered. The Hound of Distributism is a collection of essays written by leading distributist authors from around the world. Given our present social and economic crisis, this timely and rich volume challenges the sterility of our present by recovering the value of the socio-economic theory of Distributism.