http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/6/11/741373/-Is-it-all-funny-money

Why not communitarian money ?

“On a practical level, money has a practical function: it allows the goods and services produced by labor to be traded. So why not a money system where each group within working class would have direct control over the printing, availability, and value of money? I suppose there would still be counterfeiting under such a system, though with a lot of small money systems there would be a lot less motivation to counterfeit money, as well as a lot more EMPOWERED public outrage about the counterfeiters.

If I know that my group and I have made a conscious decision to back the value of our money, rather than having an externally-directed money economy shoved down our throats (pretty much the situation now), then I’m more likely to be able to do something about economic problems (eg counterfeiting), because I would be able to do something about them.”

Finally someone said it. Thank you DGH. Why is this not seen as worldliness by those who have been ordained to lead Christ’s sheep? At the risk of being called an egalitarian anti-elitist, so much of these conferences comes across as just a country-club for academics. I am all for educated ministers to the highest degree (as opposed to evangelicalism’s downplaying of educated ministers) but something seems missing in the biblical ethic of ministers/christians given gifts/being educated to serve Christ’s people. It is difficult to see these conferences as something other than academics serving themselves and those who can afford the costs of attendance.

The point of the piece was that Calvin’s defenders and detractors each engage in global as opposed to local readings of the Reformed tradition. But if you applied a localist outlook, then you might try to look for connections between Calvin and Geneva and Switzerland, rather than Queen Wilhelmina, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Massachusetts Bay Colony, or Holland, Michigan.

And this, of course, raises all sorts of questions about various Christian efforts to tie the “West” — a very anti-local notion — to any branch of the church.

“e producendo utili fantasmagorici”

http://www.ilgiornale.it/a.pic1?ID=356715

“producing phantasmagorical utility” … well indeed, if its useful to us because we say its valid, who cares if its legitimate? Its US 134.5 billion, after all…

What a parable for the times

Switzerland might be the way it is partly just because people wanted to and could be left alone for the most part, rather than because a Frenchman with a penchant for singing psalms said one thing or another in Book Four of his Institutes about government.

Indeed. Switzerland is not the way it is because of Calvin, but no doubt in spite of him and, more to the point, his intellectual heirs, who had far more success in erecting their various totems in lands far removed from the “stifling” influence of medieval traditions.

I do wonder, though, if attributing our favorite political forms and theories to our favorite theological forms and theories isn’t always impossibly circular.

Or attributing morbid political forms to our least favorite theology. Heh! But I don’t think this is necessarily so. Ideas do actually have consequences. Liberal democracy arose naturally where it arose, and was quite successful (or less morbid) where it arose, because of Calvinism. By way of contrast, the morbidity of liberal democracy was almost immediately apparent (at least to those, like Burke, who payed attention) in predominantly Catholic countries. The current triumph of liberal democracy, enforced literally since WWII at gunpoint, is not so much a case of liberal democracy adapting to fit various religious and cultural backdrops, as it is one of turning the whole world (more or less, with notable exceptions) low church Protestant.

If?

The Kuyperian gene is a hearty one; it has produced some cheerleaders almost as enthusiastic as Father Abraham himself. Jean Cauvin will get credit, all right. I was edumacated–at the school bearing his name–by people certain that Calvin had also appeared on the Mount of Transfiguration–along with those other three people.

But even the brilliance of Jesus is diminished in his followers. JC (the Genevan, not the Galilean) did give us the Institutes, which are certainly worth the trouble.

Apologies to all my EO and RC friends.

Of course, both groups are correct. The problem is that the Calvinists might be responsible for modern democracy (which is so undemocratic), modern capitalism (which is so uneconomic), and modern mis-education. And all that is before we get to the touchy subjects of Dutch independence, the Glorious Revolution, and the founding of America.

But the Chocolate is good.

Apologies to all my Presbyterian friends.

Kuyper himself credited Calvinism with Dutch independence, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the founding of America.

In broad strokes, this is no doubt true, but why stop there? The deformations of puritanism have continued unabated and even flourished down to the present day. Even by the time of the American founding, puritanism had evolved thoroughly into congregtionalism and a healthy close cousin unitarianism, the latter of which (in practice, if not theology proper) swallowed up nearly all of mainstream protestantism; to which we can attribute abolitionism, women’s suffrage, teetotalism, prohibition of drugs and alcohol, anti-smoking statutes. It is arguably the most successful mutant social gene the world has ever known. A 16 year-old girl can get abortion (in many states) without informing her parents, but yet cannot buy cigarettes even with a note from the same. For this we can thank Calvinism, in its most virulent and successful forms.