Crosses for Life
Saturday 13th November, starting at 1.30pm at Westminster Cathedral and ending at Westminster Abbey
2010 London Lectures
Relational Thinking: a vision for Christian engagement in public life
November 11th Jubilee Centre founder Michael Schluter will describe what can happen when we view all of life through a relational lens.
November 18th Paul Mills, an economist who has worked in London and Washington on global financial stability, will argue from a biblical perspective that finance is inherently relational. This lecture offers a biblical critique of the current financial system and indicates how individuals, churches and society can find ways forward in the present crisis that reflect God’s character and ways.
November 25th, Jonathan Burnside, reader in Biblical Law at Bristol University, will show how a culture of control is not the best way to bring justice to a society in which relationships are unravelling.
All Souls, Langham Place, starting at 6.30pm. More details at the Jubilee Centre
Benedict's riposte
Perhaps my favorite comment of Benedict took place during the interview with reporters on the flight over to Great Britain. The pope was asked if there was anything that could be done to make the Church more “attractive.” Benedict responded:
A Church which seeks above all to be attractive would already be on the wrong path, because the Church does not work for itself, does not work to increase its numbers so as to have more power. The Church is at the service of Another; it does not serve itself, seeking to be a strong body, but it strives to make the Gospel of Jesus Christ accessible, the great truths, the great powers of love and of reconciliation that appeared in this figure and that came always from the presence of Jesus Christ.
This is a constant Christian theme. We did not invent our religion. We received it and are to keep it in the world in the basic form in which it was handed down. If people listen, fine. But if they do not, we can only accept their choice. “The Church is at the service of Another.”
James Schall on Benedict in Britain
Augustine's Economy group
James Featherby is speaking at the first meeting of the Economy Working Group of the Saint Augustine Institute, today, Friday, 8th October 2010. James Feather will take us on his
Personal Journey through the City and Leviticus: One family’s exploration of Jubilee in an urban, post-modern, debt- driven, non-communal and never-resting world
James is author of The White Swan Formula: Rebuilding Finance and Business for the Common Good
Our problems are in reality human, not technical. They are philosophical and psychological, not regulatory or economic…
F?rst, let us not rush past the moment in which we now stand. We will not learn lessons unless we engage fully with the consequences of our mistakes. A key part of that is a proper engagement with the pain caused by our shortcomings…
I am sorry that doesn’t give you much notice. But you can admire the Institute’s website. I have posted a couple of short pieces on the Economy page
Separate money from debt at source
There is an easy solution to the financial crisis, but it involves exposing a problem that governments and economists have ignored for decades.
Much of the poverty in the world is due to the design on the banking system used in most countries, which allows 97% of money to be created by profit-making banks, and only 3% of money to be created by the government. Money created by the banks benefits the banks; money created by the government benefits everyone. This might sound difficult to believe at first, but it is accurate.
If we change this system so that money can only be created by the government (acting on behalf of the people), we could:
phase out national debt and significantly reduce corporate and consumer debts (in both the US and the UK)
reduce taxes by around 30%, permanently, or increase government services with no increase in taxation
find the money needed to solve the energy crisis
enjoy higher disposable income, or take more time off from work
avert the oncoming pensions crisis
wipe out the debt of poverty-stricken nations
Save 60% on the cost of public infrastructure projects (such as schools, hospitals and public transport), by removing the need to borrow this money and pay interest over 30 years
We are currently standing at a fork in the road. One road leads to poverty for almost everyone, while the other leads to greater wealth for everyone. Politicians and economists are taking us down the road to poverty, because they don’t know that any other option exists. If we want them to change track, and do everything that is listed above, then we – the public – need to show them that the other road does exist.
Start by reading A Quick Introduction to the Real Cause of the Crisis for a beginner-friendly explanation of the problem, the consequences, and the solution to the recent financial crisis and our current financial problems
The (proposed) Bank of England Act 2010
And see Ben Dyson and James Robertson
Our Children born into Debt
The problem is made worse still because of the way the tax burden will be distributed. For some older people – such as those in retirement – there isn’t much problem at all. They benefit from the government’s commitments, but are unlikely to have to pay much towards their cost. For young people, it is the other way round: they are expected to pay large amounts into the system and get little back in return; and the younger the person, the worse the deal. So we have an average, per person, tax burden of £73,000 if we are feeling optimistic and nearly £117,000 if we are feeling pessimistic – but in either case possibly much higher, and certainly rising – that is distributed very unevenly across the population: younger people paying much more, and older people less, if anything at all. One recent estimate suggested that a UK citizen born in 2011 will inherit, on birth, a debt of perhaps £200,000, and it could easily be much more. It is simply inconceivable that debts on this scale will be paid off in full.
Nor should they. These were not debts that youngsters freely took on, but obligations incurred on their behalf in many cases before they were even born. The uncomfortable moral question then naturally arises: at what point does the debt become so large that our future children will be born into a new form of slavery, entering the world shackled by the debts of their forbears?
This highlights the underlying moral as well as fiscal bankruptcy of the system. For years, politicians yielded to the temptation to increase spending commitments and put off the costs of those decisions into the future, when it would be someone else’s problem…. In so doing, our political system created a huge intergenerational Ponzi scheme, passing the buck from one generation to the next, until the whole rotten system inevitably collapses under its accumulated weight. The long-term, even medium-term, outlook is therefore deeply unpleasant. Taxes will rise, sharply, but these rises will not be enough, and will leave younger people with little incentive to work or to save. Benefits across the board will be cut, massively: the government will renege big-time on many of its commitments, breaking its health, pensions and other promises on a huge scale. The social and economic consequences don’t bear thinking about. And of course there is the very real danger that even these draconian measures will not be enough: that the government will lose all control of its finances and end up printing money to pay off its debts, so leading to hyperinflation and economic collapse.
Kevin Dowd The UK is Broke Cobden Centre
They are still more worried over at the Automatic Earth – 40 Ways to Lose your Future
Medaille, Mueller and Berry
Here for your delectation are three cracking new Christian analyses of economics:
John Médaille Toward a Truly Free Market: A Distributist Perspective on the Role of Government, Taxes, Health Care, Deficits, and More . You’ll find some of John Médaille’s papers at his website, and at the Distributist Review and Front Porch Republic.
At long last it seems that John D Mueller’s Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element is about to appear. Mueller gives a very significant re-telling of economics’ history with Augustine and Aquinas set in their foundational place, from which I have borrowed. You’ll find some of Mueller’s stuff at the EPPC
And there are some classic Wendell Berry essays in his new What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth.
If you are looking for long-term causes of our ongoing financial crisis, these three are a fine place to start
Death, Life and Mary in London
Whether we like it or not as British citizens and residents of this country — and whether we are even prepared as Catholics to accept this reality and all it implies — the fact is that historically, and continuing right now, Britain, and in particular London, has been and is the geopolitical epicenter of the culture of death. Our laws and lawmakers for over 50 years or more have been the most permissively anti-life and progressively anti-family and marriage, in essence one of the most anti-Catholic landscapes culturally speaking than even those places where Catholics suffer open persecution.
England itself nevertheless has a unique Christian heritage: St. Augustine, the apostle to the English appointed by Pope Gregory, defied the temptation to despair of ever converting the pagan Britons by reminding the degenerate race of the beauty, truth and dignity of marriage. St. Bede’s chronicle of English Christianity recounts this strategy, and, as he put it, “England recovered.” England is also the “Dowry of Mary,” an ancient title going back to the 14th century and even further in the spiritual language of the people. This title signified the fact that from the earliest times English Catholic Christians revered the person of the Mother of Christ with such a singular and wholehearted devotion that the very nation itself was attributed with having a supernatural role (metaphorically-speaking) in the “marriage” between the Holy Spirit and his spouse — the Virgin of Nazareth. That is to say, English Christianity, in the plan of God, has a unique role to play in being a secure foundation (like a dowry in a marriage) to the work of redemption and salvation history globally. England was the first Christian nation to bestow upon the Church the formal solemnizing of marriages, which found expression in the Sarum Rite of Marriage.
Edmund Adamus speaking to Zenit
Edmund runs Pastoral Affairs at the Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster
An end to business-as-usual
Let me tell you exactly what is going on “out there.” The so-called developed world is watching two giant forces race each other to put an end to business-as-usual for industrial civilization. These two forces are the catastrophe of debt and predicament of oil supplies. They had been running neck-and-neck for a few years, but now the catastrophe of debt is pulling slightly ahead. But even this is an illusion because these two forces are actually hitched in tandem, with the rickety cart of civilization bouncing perilously behind them, and whatever one of these forces does will affect the other. Bad debt will eventually cripple the global oil industry’s ability to perform, and the failures of the oil industry will only amplify the killing force of debt. It’s that simple.
And the simple moral of the story is that the only sane thing America can do is simplify itself, de-complexify its dangerously hyper-complex organs of daily life. I’ve stated them before but, briefly, this means simplifying the way we do farming, commerce, transportation, inhabiting the landscape, schooling, medicine, and banking. Everything we do to add additional layers of complexity to these already tottering systems will guarantee an eventual orgy of blood and material destruction to this land. Everything we do to prop up the unsustainable instead of reconstructing the armatures of everyday life will make American life a nightmare in a very few years ahead.
Jim Kunstler In the headlights
If you are up to it, a gentle review of the issues is always available from the Automatic Earth
Ideas and imagination, history and judgment
You know your problem? You live in a culture which does not take ideas seriously. It does not believe that anyone lives or dies or kills themselves for an idea. But people do. A vision inspires them. Their imagination drives them. Whether the revolution they are looking for is going to bring about the Post-Carbon future or a universal Caliphate, it is this vision and their imagination that moves them. They hold out against the dominant but dismal idea that what we want is determined by what our bodies need, or by what our gender or class or ethnicity demands. Islamicists and all other Utopians are driven by their imagination. They assume that ideas and freedom are more important than our stomachs. You Westerners believe that we are propelled only by our material interests, and that every idea is cloak for the truth of the base appetites beneath. We live in a very pessimistic society, a lot of Gnostic and Manichean stuff undiagnosed out there. We live in a culture that does not believe in culture. Which is why it despises Christians. A notice on the door of St Mary Aldermanbury advertises a talk entitled ‘Why are Christians Strange?’ How deeply we Christians have internalised other people’s perplexities and resentments. But is it really good for them that we should do so? ‘Why don’t Christians fall into line?’, ‘Why don’t they think like the rest of us, ‘Why don’t we make them behave like the rest of us.’ Put that monastic home-spun on again, you Christians, and practise your hymns, for your time will soon be here.
Niall Ferguson talked to audience of merchant bankers in St Paul’s Cathedral last night, one of the many launches of his biog of Siegmund Warburg. The title he gave himself was ‘Men, Morality and Money.’ Ferguson’s line was that when a boy, Warburg’s Mama made him pray every night, and before doing so, examine himself to find the errors and omissions of the day. Warburg thus remained a very moral man, the very model of ‘relationships banking’ rather than ‘transactions banking’. Go and do likewise, was Ferguson’s understated message to the assembled bankers. One reason that we have a financial crisis he said is that financiers don’t read history, even financial history, so never imagine (again, imagination) that their actions have consequences which may rebound on them, and that from time to time in human affairs things get rough. Warburg was a responsible banker because he, almost alone, escaped the political consequences of the economic collapse of Weimar to epitomise the old-fashioned banking of the City of London pre-the big bang. Today’s bankers are too young to remember even the 27% inflation and power-cuts of the Nineteen-Seventies. Something to look forward to.
Though Ferguson is a performer, the echo created by the architecture of that vast building meant that his voice cancelled itself out, making him scarcely audible. That building does not allow you to understate and remain subtle. You cannot offer morality ironically there. You have to give judgment, intoning slowly. Ferguson and the bankers and I were all under the judgment seat of Christ, sitting in the great cross which is the transept. Ferguson, or any one of us, can simply ask ‘Have we all done something very foolish? Have we done something that endangers our economy and our society? Have we made it more likely that the next generation will have less opportunity to live in an open economy and society than we have had? What resources does the Gospel give us to weigh these questions?’
You make no cultural contribution by talking about culture or history or morality. You have to begin with judgment. You can talk about the judgment of our successors on us, and indeed our own likely judgment when in twenty years’ time we look back on our present selves. And you can talk about the judgment of God. If you want to make a contribution, begin with the Christian faith and stay with it. Only by saying what the gospel is are we able to secure our hold on any of the cultural by-products – the political liberty that enables the free market – enjoyed by the majority who wish to remain Christianity’s cultural free-riders. You like freedom, freedom to trade? Be a Christian. Be a Jew. Someone asked Ferguson about Islamic finance, and after saying something affirming, he said that Islam was the greatest single threat to freedom and civilisation. If the assembled financiers were tired of freedom and civilisation they should simply carry on as they are and events will do the rest…
