Mary Wright  |  Just Faith Ministries Mary Wright holds a masters degree in social work from St. Louis University and a secondary teaching certificate in history and English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has taught middle school children as well as master’s level social work students at St. Louis University. She is a co-author with Chuck Collins of the book entitled “The Moral Measure of the Economy”, and has presented on this topic numerous times.

Mary has developed and presented workshops for parish, diocesan and national level conferences; she has spoken at conferences for priests, deacons, Councils of Catholic Women, Catholic schools and parish social ministry groups, worked with state legislators and given radio and TV interviews.

Mary is currently on staff at JustFaith Ministries where she advocates for Catholic Social Teaching and pursues her passion for social justice work. She has led immersion programs that brought poor and non-poor people together for intentional dialogue about poverty and its causes. She has assisted those who are poor to find their voice and use it to change their circumstances. She creatively found a way to advocate for poverty while combining it with her interest in cycling. She once led a group of twenty-four people across the US on bicycles to raise awareness of poverty!

She enjoys getting off the beaten path and meeting people whose life is different from her own. She often does this by bicycle, and most recently in South America, Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Uganda. She also spent six weeks volunteering with the Redemptorists in the Amazon, and trekked in Nepal. Even though Mary has been all over the world, her greatest joy is spending time with her married daughter, son-in-law, and three grandsons.


Chuck Collins  |  Institute for Policy Studies Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good. He is a national expert on economic inequality and the current economic crisis in the U.S. He coordinates a number of public policy initiatives to reduce income and wealth disparities, including Wealth for the Common Good (wealthforcommongood.org), a network of business leaders and high net worth individuals concerned about inequality.

He is author of several books, including Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality and Insecurity (New Press, 2005). He co-authored with Bill Gates Sr., Wealth and Our Commonwealth, a moral case for inheritance taxation. His newest book co-authored with Mary Wright, The Moral Measure of the Economy (Orbis Press/Maryknoll), examines Catholic social teachings on U.S. economic life. It was named as one of the Best Spiritual Books of 2007, according to Spirituality and Practice. He recently co-authored a comic book on the economic crisis, called the “Economic Meltdown Funnies.” He lives in Boston with his wife, the Rev. Patricia Brennan, and teenage daughter.