economy

Money, Technology, and the Silence of Churches: A Conversation with Susan Thistlethwaite

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Liberalism has many strengths. It brought God into the world. It allowed us to value the natural order and value human intellect as a way of thinking theologically. But, liberalism is a philosophy of history as progress and harmony—and that’s untrue to the nature of the Fall. Why I use the term “progressivism” instead is that progressivism is movement-based. Progressives are more communitarian, they’re not as individualistic; they have a far savvier sense that history is struggle, and that the world does not want to be changed.

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I Was Wrong About Occupy

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Thursday morning a dozen occupiers addressed forty or so clergy. We clergy were all somewhat skeptical of the demand for public space. You could hear the ministerial, rabbinical hrumphhrumph in the room. (Most of us had never occupied Zucotti Park and a downward trend in temperature wasn’t going to improve on that.) But the occupiers edged toward the theological as they articulated a need for communal, inspirational, face-to-face contact in which they could “appear” to one another.

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A Shining City: The Occupy Movement and the American Soul

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Now that the curtain’s been pulled back on the false wizardry of a deregulated financial system, and Americans have been left holding a bag full of bank bailouts, home foreclosures, historic levels of unemployment and poverty, and wage stagnation for those with jobs, “loser” is a label most of us can, in one way or another, wear easily in the current economy. So goes the American Dream these days.

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