Economic "Stuckness"

Published on July 12, 2010

Dan Schultz, at Religion Dispatches, on why we've got a "stuck" economy: Now, the religious message is that it is God who provides the newness to move things along. Specifically, according to Brueggemann, God provides a risky and "just enough" economic alternative to the madness of the market idolatry. But take out the God piece, and you still have a useful insight: our current stuckness isn't a matter of political malpractice or corruption. It's a failure of the imagination on a grand scale, an inability to conceive that newness is needed, much less that it must be embraced. Some days, I think we'd all be better off if we called it what it is, a "failure of the moral imagination," as Hannah Arendt once said, real and meaningful evil. You don't have to believe in God to get that.

Dan Schultz, at Religion Dispatches, on why we’ve got a “stuck” economy:

Now, the religious message is that it is God who provides the newness to move things along. Specifically, according to Brueggemann, God provides a risky and “just enough” economic alternative to the madness of the market idolatry. But take out the God piece, and you still have a useful insight: our current stuckness isn’t a matter of political malpractice or corruption. It’s a failure of the imagination on a grand scale, an inability to conceive that newness is needed, much less that it must be embraced. Some days, I think we’d all be better off if we called it what it is, a “failure of the moral imagination,” as Hannah Arendt once said, real and meaningful evil. You don’t have to believe in God to get that.

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