The Vestergaard-Frandsen Company, in Denmark, has found solving health problems and making products for the world’s poorest and most unhealthy places can both save lives
Time to revisit John Taylor’s classic work Enough is Enough, and to look at recession from a wider perspective. In this book Taylor develops the theology of enough. The dream of the Biblical Hebrew people, he points out, is summed up in the word shalom, “something much broader than peace, the harmony of a caring community, informed at every point by its awareness of God”.
During my husband’s job loss in the 1983 recession, we learned useful lessons that we put into our “ NOWork Workshop” for families who wanted to survive and even thrive during those scary years. We based our coaching on a team approach to job loss that stressed the importance of maintaining one’s individuality without becoming a victim or allowing the crisis to consume the family.
It turns out that foresaking material possesions is as likely to turn you into a crank as a saint, writes Michael Agger in a book review for Mother Jones magazine: “I don’t mean to throw cold water on earnest self-improvement. But maybe we should set about such tasks in a way that doesn’t reek of personal branding.”
Parishioners sometimes come up to the Rev. John Perris after Sunday worship and pull him aside.
“I need to have a conversation with you. I have started to cut back,” they’ll say. “Not everybody will tell me that they lost their job,” said Perris, pastor at St. James Episcopal Church on Valley Road. “But whether the economy is awful, or when there are other things happening, people are still coming to church.”
Faced with substantial declines in fourth-quarter giving by parishioners, many churches and faith-based organizations have been forced to curb their spending and outreach programs.
There is a closer relationship between the worlds of finance and religion than we might imagine. My ten pound sterling note says: I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of Ten Pounds. This once meant gold; what’s more important, and what actually functions, is the promise. Money is trust and relationship, and when it breaks down so does the economy.
A roundup of economists blogging on Christmas gift-giving: Are men or women more tolerant of inappropriate gifts? Christmas Signaling – What do our gifts say?
In the middle of the wonderful, bright, flashy displays that I see while walking the streets of New York, I struggle. I want to find a place within myself to enjoy that which I see without forgetting the other part of my life, the one grounded in serving Christ in a faraway place where we don’t have enough of anything, much less the extra needed to decorate lavishly.
The crowd that trampled Jdimytai Damour was not rushing toward a food relief convoy. They were not starving as a result of some catastrophic drought or flood. This mob that broke down the doors of that Wal-Mart in Long Island was after discounted televisions and the hottest new toys.