E.F. Schumacher
On consumption and ecological living:

I might have called it ‘Christian Economics’ but then no-one would have read it.

The faith behind his ideas
From 1977

I found that in England almost any old nonsense was being written and passed off as Christianity, even by bishops. And so I finally decided that the Catholic tradition was the one where I felt most at home, and where the essentials of Christianity were best preserved.

“Schumacher is a contemporary voice of what I call social Catholicism,” commented John Coleman, professor of religion and society at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, and he had delivered a paper discussing some of the ethical implications of the approach. “By this I mean the stream of Catholic thought that built on Thomistic principles, as particularly reapplied in the work of Jacques Maritain. Its adherents stressed that human institutions ought to be manageable in size, respectful of the human scale, and sanely run so that they did not damage the people involved in them.”

Critics of a well-meant third way like distributism say it’s utopian (unworkable) whilst the maligned market delivers, and can point to the Salamanca school of thought as a foundation for classical liberalism as opposed to such as well as the religious left.

From Joshua.