Fall 2024
The Christian tradition has had much to say about money. And this makes sense: Christ spoke more about the topic of money in the New Testament than any other subject. Christ both relativized its worth (i.e., “render undo Caesar what is Caesar’s) and implied in his exchange with the rich young ruler that the status of one’s salvation is somehow bound up with their relation to their wealth (or lack thereof). And the theological tradition has followed suit, speaking of money in spiritual, ethical, and theological terms.
Recent decades have witnessed Christian theologians wrestling with and responding to the evolving state(s) of capitalism in creative and challenging ways. In his infamous God the Economist, Douglas Meeks developed the notion of “God as economist” to critique the corrupted logic of the modern market. Even if the market assumes the absence of God, Meeks argued, it functions according to certain God-concepts, which justify domination in the economic sphere. More recently, in her 2015 Gifford Lectures, Kathryn Tanner explored the ways the cultural forms animating the latest iteration of finance-dominated capitalism shape human lives and points to the ways in which those ever-pervasive forces might be contested and countered by Christian belief and practice. Taking a significantly different approach in his fascinating book Divine Currency, Devin Singh interrogated the relationship between economic ideas and religious thought, arguing that monetary thought has come to be infused in the very conception and practice of Christian doctrine. Whereas money has led its logic to the structuring of doctrinal thought, theology has offered its prestige and mystique to monetary exchange. So the question of Christianity’s relation to and treatment of money is complex, contested, and ongoing.
And the import of that conversation has only recently intensified in light of the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, during which the world’s richest 10 men doubled their wealth. Wealth inequality continues climbing at exhausting rates, and the broad structures that enable such distribution don’t seem to be slowing down. And while money has no inherent value, it does make a concrete and profound impact on every human person in ways both seen and unseen. Money can make the difference between flourishing and suffering, freedom and constraint, and ultimately between life and death.
For it is not knowing much, but realising and relishing things interiorly, that contents and satisfies the soul. ―Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises You might approach the Jerusalem of the heart. —Scott Cairns, “Hidden City” This is my Church. —John Anderson, Mohawk, overlooking Sequatchie Valley Still, the opossum climbs the gnarled tree at my […]
Each dilapidated in a different way— half-patched roof, porch sagging, two sideboards painted five different shades of purple to test out for a season a choice that may cause any number of arguments— or not, nothing in this town requiring permanence or beauty except for what already is: red-breasted blackbird, deep-diving loons, a lake that […]
We want him gone— pretty boy fat with feasts and wine. Now he’s poor. Desert him! He chose his lot. As aging swine, we dare not share one crumb, least of all with him, whom we want gone. Split our scraps? God Almighty, it’s our home and up to us who joins this raucous feast. […]
In Joppa there was a disciple named Tabitha (in Greek her name is Dorcas); she was always doing good and helping the poor. About that time she became sick and died, and her body was washed and placed in an upstairs room. Lydda was near Joppa; so when the disciples heard that Peter was in Lydda, they sent two men […]
The most jarring pages in The Black Reparations Project are filled almost exclusively with numbers.A table is headed with the dry title “Annual Total Debt Estimates and Cumulative Debt Estimates at 3% Interest, 1776–1860” and dull column labels like “Hourly Wage,” “Person-hours per year,” “Annual total debt,” and “Cumulative debt at 3% interest.” The rest […]
Picture longing for an inaccessible, distant place. Call that longing farsickness. It is in form the same as homesickness, but it lacks the emphasis on memory. The homesick are exiles who remember somewhere they once were and would like to return to. They include Ovid at the Black Sea, Genji in Suma, and Vladimir Nabokov […]
The bold claim of 1 Timothy 6:10 that “the love of money is a root of all evils” is the embarrassing relative in a family of famous biblical passages. Many ministers and theologians either pretend this passage does not exist or find innovative ways of explaining it away. Some force the awkward translation “all sorts […]
