Introduction: Money
The Fall, 2009 issue of Communio is dedicated to the theme of “Money.” In his Encyclical Letter Caritas in veritate, Pope Benedict XVI called for “further and deeper reflection on the meaning of the economy and its goals.” . . .
Fall 2009
Money
Introduction
Why Socrates Didn’t Charge: Plato and the Metaphysics of Money
D. C. Schindler“Money has the whole of its truth in being a symbol of the soul’s adherence to the good. It is meant, above all, to be a ‘reminder’ to those who are wealthy in a true sense.”
Value and Equivalence: The Role of Monotheism in Early Economic Systems
Giorgio Buccellati“The relevance of monotheism to the introduction of pricing (and money) is in the affirmation of values, not primarily in the implementation of techniques. The unifying thread is the posture of facing rather than of seizing.”
Is Usury Still a Sin?
Thomas Storck“The Church has not changed her teaching on usury and one can make a reasonable argument for the validity of the intrinsic injustice of usury itself.”
Inverting the Economic Order
Wendell Berry“A properly ordered economy, putting nature first and consumption last, would start with the subsistence or household economy and proceed from that to the economy of markets.”
An Ethic of Attentiveness: The Rediscovery of Oikonomia
Mark Shiffman“Economics recasts our imagination of the life of production and consumption in the image of the unlimited acquisition of money rather than in the image of choices about goods that contribute to a good life.”
Healing the Hidden Wound: The Theology of the Body in Wendell Berry’s Remembering
Nathan Schlueter“By making detailed what is spare in the myth of the fall, and making concrete what is abstract in the Theology of the Body, Remembering brings us tangibly in touch with the primordial memory of wholeness that slumbers in every human heart.”
Retrieving the Tradition
On Money
Charles Péguy“A tradition, risen from the depths of the race, a history, an absolute, an honor demanded that this stick for a chair was well made. All the parts in the chair that were not seen were exactly just as perfectly made as the parts that were seen. This is the very principle of the cathedrals.”
Notes & Comments
A New Reformation?
Michael Hanby