I am giving a series of four short Lent lunchtime talks, with Q&A, starting Wednesday 11th March at St Stephen’s Walbrook. These will deal with Lent and Easter, Church and Eucharist, and they will be light but theological.
Long way to Easter 2 A theological economics
The second Lent talk starts like this:
To explain why we are facing this flood and these crises we have to think through covenant, love and gift. We will examine them not because these are religious ideas, but because they are fundamental economic ideas. When we attempt to understand economics without them, we achieve incoherence. Economics has indeed tried to understand human interaction and exchange without the concepts of covenant, love and gift, and the result has been the bankruptcy of economics and a crisis that is both social and economic.
You can read it here, or read the whole series here
Free Riding
We are also generally aware of the ways that the culture we oppose – of mobility, deracination and placelessness – is also based upon widespread free-riding. The culture of liberalism – writ large – has always free-ridden on the health and vitality of a pre-liberal, even anti-liberal culture. Most basically it assumes the existence of, but does little to support or replenish, the culture of good families. It relies upon the virtues of children raised in those settings, even as it is suspicious of – even destructive of – what are necessarily â??paternalisticâ?? (or â??maternalisticâ??) features of those settings. It has sought to open every closed association and civil institution, ultimately emptying them of the capacity to elicit loyalty, memory and stability. It relies on the good will and sacrifice of citizens even as it assumes that we are fundamentally rational actors driven by self-interest. Tocqueville wrote of Americans that â??we do more honor to our philosophy than to ourselves,â?? meaning that although we explain all of our actions in terms of self-interest, we actually act out of a deeper wellspring of altruism and fellowship. Over time, he observed, our actions would begin to conform to our words, however, thus eviscerating the deepest and better sources of our behavior.
Similarly, over the past century and a half, liberalism has free-ridden on the millenia-long accumulation of â??resourcesâ?? that it has shown exceptional ability in accessing and utilizing, but very little capacity to spare or save. â??Drill baby drillâ?? is akin to the adolescent refrain of â??itâ??s MINE, itâ??s MINE,â?? uncognizant of the work and fortune that went into every inheritance that we may have come into. We have been free-riding on the back of mountaintops removed, all the while congratulating ourselves for our hard work and accomplishment.
Patrick Deneen Free Riding at the very promising Front Porch Republic
They have already become Muslims
The native Dutch are moving out. Since 2004, more indigenous Dutchmen have emigrated each year than immigrants have moved in. People who have lost faith in God do not fight. They run. Since they do not believe in life after death, this life is the only thing they have to lose. One emigrant Dutchman, a homosexual author who lives in Brussels, writes: “I am not a warrior. I do not fight for freedom. I am only good at enjoying it.” This mentality has affected the whole of Western Europe. A young German woman recently said that it is “better to let yourself be raped than risk injuries while resisting, better to avoid fighting than risk death.” Europe has chosen the path of submission. Islamization is not the cause but the consequence of the collapse of Europe. The very word Islam means “submission.” Many Europeans have submitted already. In that sense, they have already become Muslims.
Theological economics
What might be some of the most basic faith-derived or faith-related values that we might want to put into our present crisis and its challenges? And I’ll simply suggest three. First – keeping promises. On the whole, religious people believe in a divine agent, power or presence that is faithful, consistent, dependable, truthful. As we seek to live a life that is in harmony with that divine reality, then faithfulness and trustworthiness are utterly fundamental to how we approach our sense of the good life. The further away you are from the people you’re contracting with, the harder it is to keep a lively and vivid and self-critical sense of the necessity of keeping promises.
Second, the sense of living in a world that does not belong to you and is not simply under your control. It is a gift to be stewarded and creatively and justly used. And going with that, of course, the sense that your own will and your own desires don’t necessarily define what’s good for anybody or anything. …in Leviticus we’re told very firmly that the land is, so to speak, lent to you. You don’t own land as a thing; you control the profits of the land over certain limited periods, because the land belongs to the Lord. The earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it, and that, I think, is again the fundamental principle.
And the third religiously derived and related principle, is the belief that ultimately, what is good for me and what is good for you are not detached, separate, non-connecting things. Finally, my life and your life belong together. My flourishing and your flourishing belong together. …We as Christians talk about the image of God, and Jews also. But however we put it, there is that sense that humanity is, in some sense, one. As a Christian, that would go still further, to the imagery of the body of Christ, in the sense that the suffering of one becomes the suffering of all, and the wealth or welfare of one becomes the wealth or welfare of all.
