Comments on Intentional Disciples: Evangelization in a Multicultural Global Community...

Here's a neat blog entry from the BBC on some maps...

2008-09-29T11:49:00.000-06:00

Here's a neat blog entry from the BBC on some maps designed to show wealth distribution from Roman Empire to the near future (2015)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2008/09/map_of_the_week_global_wealth.html

Would that someone could map Christian fervour (our treasures in heaven) in the same way, US faith may not represent the biggest territory in that universe, eh !

I appreciate your engaging my arguements Father - ...

2008-09-29T11:15:00.000-06:00

I appreciate your engaging my arguements Father - could I propose one contra your own re: market values oppose human values?|

The market, like money, is an institution of human culture that has a long pedigree attesting to its fitness for the purpose of exchange, a metric if you will of quality and quantity. Practicing communities can only become established where different gifts can be shared as far as their values can find expression and that the metric of that value can be trusted. Markets don't oppose human values so long as the humans acting in the exchange are honest brokers for the values they represent.

Spreading "goodness and love" via evangelical poverty worked for many professed religious of bygone days in the mission fields of Asia and Afric, but they're in short supply now, and the political powers of Asia and Africa are aligining themselves more with China's Peace&Prosperity message than with America's democratic liberties.

The forces that drove globalization are in contraction/recession, we cannot count commerce and trade to spread Christianity until we can vouch for the honesty of that commerce and trade - but its seems current events belie that principle, our politicians won't face the fact that actions ahave consequences, that the global reserve currency, the dollar, no longer carries any value:

"Money’s most important function is to serve as a means of exchange—a measurement of value. If this crucial yardstick is not stable, it becomes impossible for investors, entrepreneurs, savers, and consumers to make correct decisions; these mistakes create the bubble that must eventually be corrected.

Just imagine the results if a construction company was forced to use a yardstick whose measures changed daily to construct a skyscraper. The result would be a very unstable and dangerous building. No doubt the construction company would try to cover up their fundamental problem with patchwork repairs, but no amount of patchwork can fix a building with an unstable inner structure. Eventually, the skyscraper will collapse, forcing the construction company to rebuild—hopefully this time with a stable yardstick. This 700 billion package is more patchwork repair and will prove to be money down a rat hole and will only make the dollar crisis that much worse.

But what politicians are willing to say that the financial “skyscraper”—the global financial and monetary system-is a house of cards. It is not going to happen at this juncture. " Ron Paul, as delivered earlier today in Congressional debate on the bailout.

Thanks, for your insightful comments, Clare. You ...

2008-09-28T21:09:00.000-06:00

Thanks, for your insightful comments, Clare. You understand what's going on better than I. By "laissez-faire" I understood an economy based solely on market-driven values, rather than human values. But you correctly pointed out that the current bailouts - as well as the special interest shenanigans that led to the current financial crisis - demonstrate that our economy is hardly one in which a "laissez-faire" attitude rules the day.

How our government is destroying "trust" http://ww...

2008-09-28T19:16:00.000-06:00

How our government is destroying "trust"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsC2k9opOP0

a financial expert getting upset that capital is not "sacrosanct" which is kinda funny considering even human life is not sacrosanct in the US!

Fr Mike - as a cradle Catholic born with the 'wand...

2008-09-28T19:00:00.000-06:00

Fr Mike - as a cradle Catholic born with the 'wanderlust' gene (my parents, one an emigre, one a guestworker, met a half century ago in in Canada before repatriating to the UK, I met my hubby working for a US multinational in Germany and am now a US domiciled "legal alien") I am enjoying comparing my experiences with the perspective in your posts. In particular, this one on honesty and trust is apropos to the financial crisis that Wall Street and Washington are beset with. May I encourage you to consider that, according to the Austrian school that promotes the liberty of the acting person to seek purposeful means to pursue a valued end, consumerism is not the fault of a "laissez-faire" market economy (I avoid the term "capitalism" since fascism and communism are simply state-managed means of valuing human labor as a pawn in a logical postive calculus and as a Christian I abhor reducing a person's human dignity to a term in a utilitarian equation) but the end result of political "me-first" intervention on behalf os special interests (in current affairs, the US financial services industry has suffered under a mercantilist monetary policy fuelled by cheap credit and dishonest FIAT fractional reserve banking practices.
Laissez faire is not French for "let them eat cake" but rather "let them MAKE" (or produce) whatever one's faculties, talents, charisms engender one to make (cake included -- or the publishing of the recipe thereof, or the vocational training for the baking thereof, or the mechanical machinery for the manufacturing thereof, or the advertising firm for the promotion thereof, you get my point Father?).

I worry that the trade imbalances and social unrest that the dishonesty (and therefore lack of trust) that our monetary policy has unleashed may serioulsy disrupt the American way of life and diminish already weak bonds of charity between us and our underpriviliged neighbors. Many are making cheap shots that blame poor folks for fraud in borrowing money for a roof over their head that they could not afford once the real (honest, trustworthy) interest rate kicked in on their sub-prime mortgage, more heated voices blame the malady on immigrants lying to get access to credit card or a loan for a gas guzzling automobile to get to work each day, that as gas prices gnaw away at their discretionary income forces them to default on, and then finally any asociated with the financial sector is a big, bad, bogey man until (like my cousin at Lehmans's London) the firm fails and the bogey men are jobless and toothless!

The American Church has to do a lot more to educate wealthy Americans on the metaphysical reality of human action at the highest levels of our universities right down to the commercial practices of each penitent seeking absolution for lying, stealing, breaching depositors/shareholders trust, etc. This is a great challenge, too many are clueless!

May I recommend "Requiem for homo economicus" at
http://www.mayoresearch.org/files/REQUIEM.pdf

and this ontological essay "Aristotle, Menger, Mises: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Economics"
http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/menger.html

for a taste of how the Austrian school embraces a classical natural law view of the human person to act with free will building on a cultural understanding of human society built from the family unit up not from the State's powers down,

along with a book
http://www.mises.org/books/desoto.pdf

by a Spaniard Jesus Huerta de Soto that chronicles the historical trends in jurisprudence of banking practices from the Romans onward that have led to our currency being so undermined in value (-87% in the last eight years) by the Fed's FIAT powers and make so many folks believe that booms and busts are "natural" characteristics of market economies - they are not, unless one subscribes to the view contraception and abortion are liekwise "natural" to marriage (the tyranny of relativism is alive and well in all of our societies practices).

For the "Logos" to be trusted amongst our neighbors (for us to give "honest" witness to his eternal Truth) we must honor the radical truth of human free will, something many modern economical schools of thought -- from the left or right -- deny.

God Bless!