What do we owe one another when a family loses its home, its livelihood, and nearly everything that once gave life stability?
In this edition of Chesterton Radio University, we enter the world of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath—the Joad family’s journey west, the real migration of Dust Bowl families, and the enduring questions of work, property, poverty, family, justice, and human dignity.
At the center of our study is the extraordinary 1949 NBC University Theater radio adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath—part of an ambitious era when American network radio believed great literature belonged not only in classrooms, but in millions of homes.
We’ll consider Steinbeck alongside Catholic social teaching, particularly Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno, and ask where his vision of workers, families, property, solidarity, and economic justice converges with—and differs from—the Catholic tradition. And where appropriate, we’ll bring G. K. Chesterton into the conversation: his defense of ordinary people, home, family, property, local community, and the dignity of the human person.
This isn’t simply a book review.
It’s a conversation about one of the oldest questions of civilization:
What do we owe one another?
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