New house rules: Christianity, economics, and planetary living

Daedalus

Volumn 130, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 125-140

  McFague, Sallie ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

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EID: 33748072445     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. In a special issue of Dædalus entitled "The Liberation of the Environment," the lead essay, by Jesse Ausubel, opens with the claim that the liberator of the environment will be human culture, whose "most powerful tools are science and technology."
2. Dædalus 125 (3) (Summer 1996): 1.
3. The tone throughout the essay as well as others in the issue is optimistic, as Ausubel notes in closing by quoting the epitaph inscribed on the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.: "To science, pilot of industry, conqueror of diseases, multiplier of the harvest, explorer of the universe, revealer of nature's laws, eternal guide to truth." Dædalus, Ibid., 15.
4. Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," Science 155 (10 March 1967): 1203-1207.
5. Marcus J. Borg describes this well: "A root image is a fundamental 'picture' of reality. Perhaps most often called a 'world-view,' it consists of our most taken-for-granted assumptions about what is possible. . . . Very importantly, a root image not only provides a model of reality, but also shapes our perception and our thinking, operating almost unconsciously within us as a dim background affecting all of our seeing and thinking. A root image thus functions as both an image and a lens: it is a picture of reality which becomes a lens through which we see reality." Marcus J. Borg, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship (Valley Forge, Penn.: Trinity Press International, 1994), 127.
6. The literature on the neoclassical economic model and its alternative - what I am calling the ecological economic model - is large and growing. Some of the works I found most helpful are as follows: Lester R. Brown et al., State of the World annual reports (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984-);
7. Robert Costanza et al., An Introduction to Ecological Economics (Boca Raton, Fla.: St. Lucie Press, 1997);
8. David A. Crocker and Toby Linden, eds., Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global Stewardship (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998);
9. Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr., For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future, 2d ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994);
10. Herman E. Daly, Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996);
11. Neva R. Goodwin, Frank Ackerman, and David Kirion, eds., The Consumer Society (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997);
12. Steven C. Hackett, Environmental and Natural Resources Economics: Theory, Policy and the Sustainable Society (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998);
13. Larry L. Rasmussen, Earth Community Earth Ethics (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1996);
14. Joerg Rieger, ed., Liberating the Future: God, Mammon, and Theology (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1998);
15. United Nations, Human Development Report, issued annually (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990-);
16. Michael Zweig, ed., Religion and Economic Justice (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
17. By the oldest and deepest anthropology, I am referring to what George Hendry calls the "cosmological" and "political" understandings of God and the world rather than the more recent and narrow "psychological" view. George Stuart Hendry, Theology of Nature (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980), chap. 1. The latter, which supports individualism, has arisen in the last several hundred years; but the other two, one emphasizing the whole creation and the other the community of all human beings, are grounded in the Hebrew Scriptures as well as in the New Testament and early theology (especially Irenaeus and Augustine).
18. The evidence supporting this claim would take considerable space to lay out. Suffice it to say here that both the born-again and New Age versions of popular religion do so; the Declaration of Independence's "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" does; and Adam Smith's description of the human being as a creature of insatiable greed makes a significant contribution. All focus on the rights, desires, and needs of individuals.
19. Milton Friedman's distinction between "positive" and "normative" economics is typical: "Normative economics is speculative and personal, a matter of values and preferences that are beyond science. Economics as a science, as a tool for understanding and prediction, must be based solely on positive economics which 'is in principle independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgments.'" Milton Friedman, Essays in Positive Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 4.
20. Hackett, Environmental and Natural Resources Economics, 33.
21. See Daly, Beyond Growth, 50ff.
22. Janet N. Abramowitz, "Valuing Nature's Services," State of the World 1997, ed. Lester R. Brown et al. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977).
23. Janet N. Abramowitz, " State of the World 1997, Ibid., 109.
24. Bangladesh, a country that may well be flooded through global warming, produces a yearly average of 183 kg of carbon dioxide per capita versus an average of 11,389 kg per capita in the industrialized countries. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1998 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 57.
25. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Second Assessment - Climate Change 1995, published by the world Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme. It should be noted that this report was the consensus of 2,500 weather scientists and was published without a dissenting minority report. Since that time, its results have been confirmed by recent studies.
26. Costanza et al., An Introduction to Ecological Economics, 179.
27. If all contemporary understandings of Christ should be grounded in historical judgments about Jesus of Nazareth - if there should be continuity between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith - then we need to see if the ecological economic context is an appropriate one for interpreting Christ and Christian discipleship for the twenty-first century. I am not suggesting that a Christian's faith is based on the state of historical Jesus research at any particular time; nonetheless, Christianity has always claimed continuity with its founder. Recent research, which has moved out of narrow church contexts of interpretation to sociological, cultural, and political ones of first-century Mediterranean society, has reached a remarkable consensus on some broad outlines of Jesus' life: most notably, that he was a social revolutionary opposed to the structures of domination and domestication of his day. This consensus is expressed in different ways by New Testament scholars such as E. P Sanders, Burton Mack, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and Richard Horsley. For an overview of the scholarship, see Borg, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship.
28. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarpersSanFrancisco, 1994).
29. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, Ibid., 73-74.
30. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, Ibid., 68.
31. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, Ibid., 113-114.
32. See ibid., 79-81.
33. See letter of 30 April 1944 in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (London: Collins, 1960), 90ff.
34. Psalm 24:1.