CHUCK COLLINS WAS “born on third base.” As a scion of the Oscar Mayer meat processor fortune, Collins was firmly in America’s top 1%. However, at age 16, he began reading The Catholic Worker newspaper, co-founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. Within two years he was living with the Mustard Seed Catholic Worker community in Worcester, Mass., serving soup to homeless men. Day’s philosophy of “nonviolent economics” exposed Collins to the violence caused by economic systems. Day believed that there is a “social mortgage on capital” and that society has a claim on private wealth, since it comes from the commons. At age 26, Collins made what he called “the first real adult decision of my life.” He gave away the half-a-million-dollar trust fund his parents had set up for him to local and national groups working for social change.

For 40 years, Collins has organized for a more moral economy. “The prophets, then and now,” he’s written, “call us to a discipleship of equality, working for a society that leaves no one behind, and where all can thrive.” Author of a dozen books, Collins’ newest is Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet. He is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good and co-edits inequality.org. He lives in Vermont. Sojourners editor Julie Polter interviewed Collins in September via Zoom. —The Editors