Possessed

Most Christians in the Northern Hemisphere simply do not believe Jesus' teaching about the deadly danger of possessions. Jesus warned that possessions are highly dangerous -- so dangerous, in fact, that it is extremely difficult for a rich person to be a Christian at all.... Christians in the United States live in one of the richest societies in the history of the world, surrounded by a billion desperately needy neighbours and another two billion who are poor. We are far more interested in whether the economy grows than in whether the lot of the poor improves. We insist on more and more, and reason that if Jesus was so unAmerican that he considered riches dangerous, then we must ignore or reinterpret his message.

Ronald SiderRich Christians in an Age of Hunger

God the economist

As God's economist, Jesus reveals a way of being in the world both economic and spiritual. Economically, he signals that redistribution of resources in the direction of those in need of them should be a normal and even central concern for a person growing in spiritual maturity. Why? Precisely for theological reasons: our lack of final ownership of our resources is rooted in our lack of ownership of the God who ultimately creates all. God is not at our disposal. As the trusted mystery, God is the uncontrollable. As the gracious Creator on whom our goods depend, our goods participate in God's uncontrollability. As in the encounter with that power on which we all depend, we can only render ourselves faithful stewards of our gifts.

Tom Beaudoin

Consuming Faith

The ideology of the cancer cell

The ability of the industrial economy to provide jobs and homes depends on prosperity, and on a very shaky kind of prosperity too. It depends on "growth" of the wrong things, such as roads and dumps and poisons--on what Edward Abbey called "the ideology of the cancer cell"--and on greed with purchasing power. In the absence of growth, greed, and affluence, the dependents of an industrial economy too easily suffer the consequences of having no land: joblessness, homelessness, and want. This is not a theory. We have seen it happen.

Wendell Berry
"The Agrarian Standard" in The Essential Agrarian Reader

Difference

Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing ... But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion.

- Audre Lorde
from her book Sister Outsider