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Karl Polanyi first wrote The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time in 1944. 

Much has changed (understatement) since 1944; and yet…

And yet, unfortunately, one of the things that has not changed is our need to still learn some of the lessons that Polanyi suggested were needed back in 1944 (Joseph Stiglitz underscores this perspective in his forward to the 2001 edition printed almost sixty years later).

  So what are some of these lessons that Polanyi writes to us in The Great Transformation?

  A major premise Polanyi explicates in his text is that social life and economic life are to be understood as interconnected.  If the economic capital of people suffers then the social capital of the places in which such people reside will also tend to suffer.  From this thesis, in contradistinction to people like Ayn Rand and other “free-market” advocates, Polanyi did not believe that a non-regulated economic market was a viable or healthy socio-political model.  Instead, he felt that economic regulation through governmental intervention was necessary if a society was to have a real chance at maintaining some semblance of healthy equilibrium/functionality.

  I agree with the above, but I would like to also add the variation that isn’t offered there; that is, I also think that if the social capital of people suffers then the economic capital of the places in which such people reside will also tend to suffer.

  I don’t really think that we can place one variation fully against the other in an either-or scenario.  There is a symbiotic relationship in process.  Economics affects sociality and sociality affects economics.

  However, symbiosis noted, I personally lean toward preferencing sociality a bit over economics as I feel that having a proper heart-orientation and community connections can facilitate people better navigating situations of poverty or even just times of economic hardship if and as they arise.  While there are multiple examples that can be offered toward this – including some from economists – let me just offer two. 

  One example that I greatly appreciate is the work of Harvard’s Robert Putnam work which as relates to this case underscores that strong internetworked community bonds makes for more resilient and more equitable/just societies.  He writes about this factor in various of his texts, but an early and important study from both micro and macro analysis is offered in Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy.  This text considers a twenty-some year longitudinal study of northern and southern Italy asking why there is such vastly differentiated economic societal fortunes playing out in the two regions.  The answer in short is civic interconnectedness.  It’s an important study that can be extrapolated to other areas.  [Other texts of Putnam’s that are helpful in this area include: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community; Better Together: Restoring the American Community; Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society…]

  A second example that is meaningful for me is the book and the video of The Man Who Planted Trees by

By Jean Giono.  This is a story that can be understood to poignantly portray both sides of how economics and community sociality are vital to one another.  Elzeard Bouffier is the protagonist in the story and provides us with a character of great moral bearing who is able to redeem and revive a barren land through the steadfastness of his heart coupled with perseverance at his task.  He is an example of how deeply, rooted understanding of community can weather and eventually overcome economic setbacks.  However, Elzeard is needed in the first place because the land has been laid waste through untoward community practices that has led to almost total environmental collapse of the surrounding area.  This has driven most people away from the area and those who stayed have become hostile due to the harsh conditions.  Their souls have become mirrors of that which surrounds them.  They were not strongly rooted in communal care in the first place and thus instead of being able to work to transmute “lead into gold” per se, their own spirits have become leaden.  This is an excellent tale that showcases care for what is around us leads to well-being of both the personal and the communal while disdain for what is around us leads to all kinds of harm.

  Polanyi’s text fits well alongside these other texts reminding us of the interconnected nature of this reality in which we exist for better and/or for worse.

In the beginning…out of nothing…God created.  We, created in the likeness of the Maker who makes all things, are ourselves world-makers.  This is our birthright.  There are those who still actively name this birthright and call us to living into its freedom, joy and responsibility.  The Presbyterian Church USA works toward “renewing the church to transform the world.” The Episcopal Church claims that a “revolution (of justice and peace) is precisely what God’s work, God’s mission, is all about.” The Mission of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America states that “transforming the structures of society, working for justice, and preserving the earth.” And the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops in writing about world-change offer, “Our faith demands it. Our teaching calls us to it. Our nation needs it and others depend on it. We can make a difference.”[1] These are examples of so many more organizations and people that also encourage us into creating and creating well.

This is how James Davison Hunter powerfully begins his book To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility in the Late Modern World.  Sadly, Hunter notes that many see their Christianity as that stereotypical crutch – something to help them deal with the complexities and hardships that come their way.  Too few see their faith as a bolstering, enlivening, power-bequeathing and generative principle.  Yet, there are those who do understand their faith in this manner and we celebrate them the world over – Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa, Jimmy Carter, and the like. 

What I appreciate about Hunter’s text is his emphasis on the need for institutions in order to really be effective at sustainably changing society.  While I do find that he has a bit stronger emphasis on this, at the expense of personal interaction, than I would like, I generally agree that substantive, sustainable change must involve institutions in some form.  Hunter writing from a sociological perspective recognizes that institutions in central societal positions bear most possibility for significant influence and he notes that many in the church occupy comparatively marginal positions.  And thus, he wisely suggests that we stop putting quite so much pressure on people to be “world-changers” writ-large.  Instead, how we should encourage them toward “faithful presence” where they happen to be on any given day at any given place.

I agree…and yet…here we are following in the footsteps – two some centuries on – of a backwater villages Carpenter’s son who gathered some lower-rungs-of-society (overall) companions to him.  He walked around with them, got a lot of people angry and then got himself killed.  Later, many of his companions managed to also get themselves killed even after a previously unheard of resurrection from the dead transpired (you’d think they could have gotten a bit of street cred from that…).  So, while I do agree with Hunter’s analysis overall, I also retain just a bit of wonderment at the beautiful unpredictability of just how God works in the world and remain glad that I am part of that tradition.

Murray Jardine leads us down a path that many have noted before, but he does a good job of it.  Namely, our scientific and technological capabilities are outstripping our ability to morally process their implications before implementing them into our lives.  Throughout his book, The Making and Unmaking of Technology Society: How Christianity Can Save Modernity From Itself, Jardine seeks to awaken us from a sense of mesmerized stupor at the shiny baubles we are allowing to control our lives.

Jardine repeats the critique of Weber that Weber makes of his own orientation in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and adds his own particularities to it.  That is, the ascetic aspect of Christianity – it’s moral restraint – on its own is actually detrimental in the long-run to the idea of a healthily functioning society because it doesn’t allow for a reasonable mitigation of the effort it will put toward earning money.  So, Jardine argues that we need more characteristics to be emphasized alongside moral restraint.  He writes for instance that we need,

“a sense of the moral limitations inherent in our capacity for speech . . . Thanks to literacy and modern inventions . . . we live in a culture that is extremely visually oriented and relatively closed to the sound-dimension of human experience. Thus it is essential, if we are to develop a moral sense that can enable us to deal with technology, that we recapture a much richer sense of what we are doing when we speak and listen to other human beings. This in turn implies that we must rebuild local communities characterized by face-to-face contact—that is, where speaking becomes a more central part of daily life . . .”[1]

Overall, Jardine is looking for a complete, recovered sensibility of the Christian faith as love for all people that he believes has the capacity to overturn all kinds of social negativity and create a new socio-political milieu.  I greatly appreciate that Jardine is calling for a renewal of a sense of ethicality in our day-to-day lives.  I like that he is also calling for a refocusing on the tools of our technological multiverse that have become so pervasive in our lives.  He isn’t saying “no” to any of these things.  He is just saying that it would be in our best interests to think more thoroughly about the how and why and how much of each of the items we implement into our lives.  Sound advice.  

How does the technology that I use facilitate growth in my faith?  How does the technology that I use further connect me with others and enhance community?  Is there a way that I can lessen my use of technology and continue any positives that I am experiencing? Antithetically, how does the technology that I use hinder my faith?  How does the technology that I use separate me from other and stunt community growth? Is there a way that I can lessen my use of technology and end any negatives that I am experiencing?

How would you answer the above questions?

In case you haven’t noticed a significant amount of people think something is wrong with America.  Now, it’s hard to believe that anyone really takes this idea seriously, because when you think about it, really think about it, what changes actually get made?  Are there still uncharged inmates at Guantanamo? Do we still have the largest inmate population in the world? Nuclear weapons…are they still around? Wealthy elites still around gaining their money at the expense of inadequately paid and protected labor?  America still sending troops all around the world whenever and wherever and not seeking UN approval unless it’s helpful? Any new gun laws around or any kind of legislation get passed seeking to prevent further harms?  Still the largest homeless population in the industrialized world? How about immigration…any helpful legislation passed there…have we stopped separating families yet? 

So, just some suggestions among many that could be offered above.  It would seem like we have some things that we could arguably work on a bit. And yet. And yet we have not seen much if any substantive movement on a lot of the above issues.  This is why it becomes difficult to take ourselves seriously.

Ben Douthat in his book Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics wants to help us understand why we think something might be wrong with America and in doing so it just might increase the chances of getting some movement on the above issues. Maybe.

As you might guess from his book title, his suggestion of this “wrongness” in American society has to do with religion – specifically, skewed and or absent religion.  Douthat suggests conservatives believe it is due to falling away from the Founders Faith, to being bullied into secularization, to diverting from Manifest Destiny type scenarios, to a loss of moral framework that Alexis de Tocqueville predicted so long ago.[1] Liberals suggest that it’s due to draconian Christianness, to American Theocracy, basically just to too much “piety and zeal.”[2]  Of course, these positions between the two camps appear to be direct opposites, but Douthat writes that they have more in common than might be expected.  Yes, there are problems with both too much and too little religion, but the primary problem isn’t this.  The primary problem is not about much or little, but about bad; it’s about bad religion.  In a bit of hyperbole on my part, Douthat writes that Pseudo-Christianities are popping up all over and no one knows what they’re doing in relation to what he notes as traditional Christianity.  He hits hard, writing, “it’s…a place where traditional Christian teachings have been warped into justifications for solipsism and anti-intellectualism, jingoism and utopianism, selfishness and greed.”[3]

In the midst and the end however, Douthat offers some hope.  He writes a meaningful and simultaneously hilarious statement, “The history of Christianity has always featured unexpected resurrections.”[4] Christianity has managed to metamorphosize in all kinds of cultures while still maintaining its core integrity. Ages of crises have been followed by ages of renewal and G.K. Chesterton has noted that while many times “the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs [in the end] it was the dog that died.”[5]  Douthat shows that new revitalizing movements are taking the place of decrepit structures.  New people are replacing those that have passed on.  Behold, once again, a new day dawns for the perpetual phoenix that is Christianity.

The question for each of us is where do we fall in this? Are we part of the hindrance or part of creative new ways forward that yet remain faithful to the core of what came before?

[1] Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, (New York, NY: Free Press, 2012), 2.

[2] Ibid., 3.

[3] Ibid., 4.

[4] Ibid., 277.

In Making Room for Leadership: Power, Space and Influence, Mary Kate Morse does something amazing. She gets us outside of living inordinately inside our heads.  That is, it’s not that we are overthinking things (though that can happen); instead, it’s that we have had a tendency to incorrectly be thinking about a lot of things.  One such thing often thought about unhelpfully is power.

If you want a subtitle for this book, here’s the redemptive one that I would like to offer from a quote straight out of the book, “how power used well can make a big difference in someone’s life.”[1]  It does seem that there are a lot of times when those “with power” are one’s that haven’t really reflected upon their power and how it is affecting them and others around them.  As well, it seems like there are a lot of times when those “without power” have thought about such aspects, but are not appropriating their giftedness due to a variety of reasons.  Mary Kate Morse’s book is about changing this dynamic and she does a good job of getting at it.

Recently, I have been reading quite a bit on economy and its relation to the practice and understanding of faith.  In this book too, Mary Kate in her discussion of leadership notes Jesus’ practice of self-giving hospitality in relation to economic structures in contradistinction to a primary orientation of self-focused consumption.  She focuses on the idea of sharing over taking. 

Leading the way that Jesus led is in one way, shape or form incumbent upon all of us who follow Christ.  Actually, perhaps it would be just as well to write “living” as well as “leading.”  A piece in Morse’s book I find refreshing is when she writes, “Although Jesus had a tremendous amount of power he did not refer to himself as a leader or a king. Yet no one else has influenced this world as much as Jesus has.”[2]  This should be eminently encouraging to us.  It’s not the kind of understanding that will make all of the problems of the world disappear, but it will assist in recalibrating our perspectives which well might make a number of the problems of the world disappear.

Over my years in leadership, one thing that I have desired to exemplify is authenticity and openness to participation.  Of course, like any person, there are days when I am better at this and days which I could have been better.  But, overall, I think that due to my focus on these aspects and my desire to live into them well, I have done reasonably well at making this part of my practice.  Certainly, I see many people in leadership positions that at the very least don’t seem to be actively working to exemplify this.  I hope to influence more people along these lines and it is encouraging to have Morse write a bit about this.

“Authentic leadership – leadership that catalyzes a group toward deep change and moves its members in positive, energizing directions – involves the group acting together.”[3]

Navigating the waters of leadership is anything but simple.  However, by the grace of God and with some training and ongoing practice I think that we all can come together a bit more and accomplish greater goals than we expect.

  [1] MaryKate Morse, Making Room For Leadership: Power, Space and Influence (Downers Grove, IL: Inter Varsity Press, 2008), 18.

[2] Ibid., 29.

This blog post is being driven from reading William T. Cavanaugh’s Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire and Vincent J. Miller’s Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture.

However, I have recently written another blog post on a related reading dealing with economics, socio-political interaction and faith.  I engaged Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in that post.  Weber’s text written over 100 years ago (1904/1905; translated into English, 1930) remarkably shines through in both of the texts that I am focusing on now.

Both of these texts do an excellent job showcasing the powerful need for positive alternatives being offered to the 24/7/365 inundation so many of us are experiencing of negative economic orientations.  As well, both texts, offer some helpful guidance in this area of positive alternatives.

I like how Cavanaugh discusses not simply eschew the idea of “free market” just because it has not met expectations.  Instead, Cavanaugh queries what it would take to make a market truly free?[1] I further appreciate that he doesn’t settle for an answer of negative freedom; for example, just being content with a lack of state intervention.  Rather, Cavanaugh encourages exploration into what would be a robust sense of freedom, a flourishing, life-giving sense of exchange.  He encourages us to search the Scriptures for these examples and then courageously begin to live into them.  He notes that this will not be primarily a top-down approach – though there is a place for this – but instead, we need to begin enacting the principles we see the Scriptures calling us to in the here-and-now where we currently reside.

This enacting of principles in the here-and-now sounds loudly in Cavanaugh’s discussion of Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s notion of the “universal Body of Christ” overcomes the superficiality of the “universal gaze.”  We are able to healthily appropriate the universal in the Body of the Christ in each of our particular/local interactions.  However, our focus on global identity (on globality), often turns our “universal gaze” into – in my term – a “universal glaze.”  This isn’t always the case.  There are ways around this glazing to become more rooted at the same time as broadening one’s horizons, but it is a strong tendency and negative examples abound.

Miller’s text sits well in conversation with Cavanaugh’s.  Miller is concerned with the idea of commodification throughout the text and how this leads us to unconscious acceptance -- through habitual acts – of what amounts to essentially contextless material to us.  We know little to nothing often about where it came from, what it’s really made of, the process whereby it was produced, the person or persons involved in the process, various entities to which our monies are going to in relation to our buying the product, etc. 

It is safe to say in the eyes of these authors that we are first and foremost not consumers.  For that matter, we are first and foremost not even producers.  First and foremost we are simply human.  We are image bearers of the identity of God that have worth above-and-beyond any particularities of action in which we engage.  This isn’t meant to lessen responsibility and consequences for actions, it is instead meant to allow for the free-choosing of better actions due to not feeling inordinately driven by unhealthy existential pressures.

I highly recommend these texts as materials to assist in the grappling of living well on the face of this wonderful planet that we are meant to care for as a creation of the God we serve.  We haven’t always done so well at caring for the Earth all around us, but I’d like to think that the more that we stop focusing on what we don’t have and more on the amazingness of who we already are and the miracle of our Being the more likely we’ll be freeing ourselves up to live well for God, for ourselves, for others and for the sake of the earth all around us.

What would it really mean for us to believe that God will supply all of our needs, that God really does care for us like the sparrow and the grass of the fields, etc.?  How might that kind of trust transform our lives and the lives around us for the better?