Going Public with a New Conviction

When I presented the paper on God’s economy at the Nurturing the Prophetic Imagination conference, I arrived at an important moment for me because I was going public with new thinking for me. I was testing on others what I had come to believe about how economics and religion mixed. I was rejecting the idea that religion’s contribution to business was confined to instilling ethics and morality. I was advocating that religion has a point of view about which business model and which model of economics we choose. It was the most forceful, public declaration that I had made on such issues up to that point. 

I felt sweaty and excited. I was animated and anxious. When my 20 min. timeslot was up, I yielded the mic to the next related presenter, a professor from a business department, and benefitted from his presentation on entrepreneurs as prophets. A new thought.

A few weeks following the conference I was pleased that Jamie Gates and Mark Mann, two who produced that conference, selected my paper to be included in a book they planned, entitled Nurturing the Prophetic Imaginagion. That book is now being published and will be available soon at the 2012 American Academy of Religion conference in Chicago. 

When did you go public the first time with something you held deeply?

Jubilee — an Economic Model, Not Just Happier Ethics

Just what was it that changed my mind from thinking, “No, there is no such thing as God’s Economy,” to “maybe.” Foremost was the group of people in Chicago with whom Juanita and I had met around Ross and Gloria Kinsler’s book, The Biblical Jubilee and the Struggle for Life. It challenged my ideas that the bible was hands-off on economic models. They showed how the “biblical jubilee” is a model that got expressed through specific lifestyle choices then and still does. I was convinced and readily joined others in the group to form the nonprofit, Jubilee Economics Ministries, dedicated to explicating this economic model, not just as theory, but as a practical alternative to the prevailing economic system. 

By fall of 1999, after Juanita and I had both retired early from our careers, we moved into an intentional community in Chicago with three other households. We named our house and community “Peaceweavings.” There, Juanita and I devoted ourselves to living more fully this new economic model and to the new nonprofit. Though Juanita stopped working with Jubilee Economics after a year, we continued our efforts to live lives shaped by its economics. I continued as the organization’s director even when we moved to San Diego early in 2002.

Challenged repeatedly by the question, “What is a jubilee economy?” I have gradually come to answer, “It is an economy that shows us how to live interdependent with all species while using the resources of only one planet.” The name “jubilee” comes from the version of this economy that the Hebrew people adapted to fit their social structures and cycle of religious holidays. But the model’s origins lie with the First Peoples worldwide. Both First Peoples and Hebrew people held that their economic choices were spiritual choices. The same holds true for me today. I believe that my economic choices show whether I practice the spirituality of Multi Earth or One Earth ways.