Nice to see him out and about.
Picture is by Ruth Gledhill of the London Times.
Via
Showing posts with label Economics. Show all posts
A Word as the Deficit Discussions Continue in Washington
Image by More Good Foundation via Flickr“If American Christians simply gave a tithe rather than the current one-quarter of a tithe, there would be enough private Christian dollars to provide basic health care and education to all the poor of the earth. And we would still have an extra $60 to 70 billion left over for evangelism around the world.”
Ron Snider
What Will Your Next Five Minutes Look Like?
Nothing like a little perspective as we head into Lent...
Could the Business World Be Used to Fight Poverty?
That's what this video challenges.
(HT to The Kruse Kronicle, which has a great description of itself "Commentary and Reflection on Ministry and Culture in the Twilight of Western Civilization)
The Twelve Days of Christmas, More Expensive This Year
Image by FrodoBabbs via FlickrAt least that's what the New York Times claims as it pertains to those leapin' lords, golden rings, and partridges in pear trees.
Here's a bit of what they have to say:
Rising prices for birds and gold pushed the cost of the 12 gifts — from the partridge in the pear tree to the 12 drummers drumming — up by 9.2 percent to $23,439.38, according to PNC Wealth Management, the second-biggest increase since the Christmas Price Index was started 27 years ago. The biggest rise was a 16 percent jump in 2003.
For the True Love in the song to bestow all the gifts repeatedly over 12 days — meaning 12 partridges in 12 pear trees and so on — would cost nearly $100,000, PNC said.
So...no calling birds for my "True Love" this year. We'll try again next year.
Read the whole article HERE.
A Shout Out for Fair Trade Coffee -- An Infographic
Christine M. Røde created this eye-opening fair-trade awareness Poster at the California College of the Arts. (HT to Good)
How Rich Are You? This will BLOW YOUR MIND!
| I'm loaded. It's official.I'm the 51,263,593 richest person on earth!  How rich are you? >> |
It is a mind-blowing Monday morning here in Girdwood. I was planning on heading back to bed for another hour of sleep, but I'm trying to grapple with the fact that I'm in the TOP ONE PERCENT OF INCOME EARNERS IN THE WORLD.
Gulp.
A Report on the Decline in Donations to Churches
Here's a section from the article. Read the whole thing at the New York Times site.
From storefront chapels to Sun Belt megachurches to suburban synagogues, across denominational lines, religious institutions are reeling from a decline in donations.
The National Cathedral in Washington, the most prominent Episcopal church in the United States, has made four rounds of staff layoffs since 2008. The Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., an archetypal evangelical megachurch, has laid off staff members, sold property, and been sued by creditors. In the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, the 55-member Primera Iglesia Getsemani, its monthly intake falling to $400 from $900, is surviving by running a weekly flea market on its sidewalk.
While the recession has sharpened the drop in giving, it is not entirely responsible for it. Rather, it has accentuated and accelerated a trend away from giving to religious organizations that scholars have been tracking for the past decade. The impending wave of retirements by baby boomers, who start hitting age 65 next year, threatens another blow to congregational income.
A Wallet: Recycled, Animal Friendly, Fair Trade, Kiva-supporting AND...
...made from recycled plastic bags and newspapers collected from the streets of Delhi.
This is from HOLSTEE.
According to their site, this is how and why they made it:
When it came time to buy a new wallet, we couldn't find what we were looking for so we designed our own...
The slim wallet design holds the essentials - cash, credit cards and even has a sliding window for your ID and Metro card.
Working with a family-run non-profit based in India that works to collect and recycle litter off the streets of Delhi we were able to create our dream wallet. This vegan wallet is made primarily of plastic bags and newspapers, collected off the Streets of Delhi in India. Production of this wallet helps reduce waste in Delhi, provides fair wage employment and subsidizes healthcare and education for each employee's family.
Our packing is a minimal slide insert made of (at least) 90% recycled material.
I'm wondering what it will be like buying your new clothes or the latte or the stereo equipment when you pull your money out of something that a third world family collected from the streets.
Perspective.
$25
Would be cool.
Colonialism
This poster, a protest concerning Shell Oil making huge profits while the people of the Niger Delta live in poverty, bothers me. It bothers me, not just because there are people who have polluted water and polluted soil and polluted homes. It bothers me because I am part of the problem...me and my Chevy Suburban and Honda Pilot.
Sure, I want all the world's people to be free of poverty. But I also want my gas as cheap as possible.
So, "Fill 'er up!" with a healthy dose of guilt today.
Christianity (Puritans) and Capitalism
See this from over at the New York Times' "Idea of the Day" blog -- although it's from a week ago now. It's called, "How Puritans Turned Capitalist."
The Idea is:
The Idea is:
When Boston’s dour Puritan preachers embraced markets as a moral good three and a half centuries ago, it was a watershed in the formation of the American economy and the national character.This idea come from Mark Valeri's book, "Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America" and claims that, when life got rough in Puritan America, those who used to disdain the market as evil, started seeing that it was necessary to have some economic growth to get the country on track. It was, perhaps, self-preservation that got some of our more conservative religious folk on the capitalism bandwagon...all in the name of Jesus.
Here's what Valeri says about Rev. Samuel Willard, one of those Puritans who helped this change along...
[He] preached during a period when Boston merchants believed that their occupation was essential to the commonweal — to England’s prosperity and therefore to Protestantism and liberty. Their strategies to convey goods, credit, and power throughout the British Atlantic proved them to be patrons of the empire. Many moralists, Willard included, valorized them in such terms. His successors, leading Boston pastors of the 1710s, 1720s, and 1730s, went further. They, along with their parishioners, sanctioned the practices that guaranteed economic success as moral mandates, and the rules that governed commercial exchange as natural and divine laws. Their convictions informed a market culture that, by many accounts, came to maturity by 1750 and provided motives for rebellion against the British Empire after the cessation of war with France.
You can read a lot more from the author in an interview with the Boston Globe.
So, if this is how the connection between consumerism and American Christianity was solidified, how do we "unsolidify" it?
Show Me the Money!
- I want things.
- I'm a consumer.
- I'm a slave to advertising like others.
- I like my money.
- We're planning a Financial Peace University class for our church and community this fall.
- I'm getting to an age where these are concerns for me.
- I have a mortgage.
- I wonder about kid's college costs.
- I have a car I need to pay down.
- The church I pastor is trying to build and not sink in debt.
- My wallet's in my back pocket.
- And I'm a Christian, trying to navigate these muddy waters.
So be prepared for some economic thought over the next several days as I grapple with some of this and share some of what I've found.
Show Me The Money
