markets and morality
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
A few months ago I went to the Veritas event in Cambridge (UK): Can Capital Markets be Moral?. It was a ’round table’ discussion with a diverse set of speakers — with some coming from the city, some from theology and some from a social entrepreneur angle. All interesting, but perhaps a little frustrating at times as the issues they addressed were so wide ranging there was no clear debate and I’m not sure the question really got address head on.
One view put forward by a couple of speakers was (roughly) ‘markets are structures and structures cannot be moral or amoral — only people.’ (I’m not sure how consistently this was held — the line between market and the people in the market seemed to blur places. Speakers also said things like ‘regulation is no use, the market gets around regulation’. But leaving that aside…)
All this raised a question for me: if we changed the subject to something like Can Brothels be Moral? would the speakers have taken a similar approach? It seems to me that that is a structure that has some moral content.
Perhaps we need to say that when people develop structures those structures tend to embody their values. So, a structure will end up encouraging or discouraging certain values, certain moral stances.
Interestingly, the first Reith Lecture this year was also on Markets and Morals. The lecturer — the excellent Michael Sandel — noted this:
…markets are not mere mechanisms. They embody certain norms. They presuppose, and also promote, certain ways of valuing the goods being exchanged. Economists often assume that markets are inert, that they do not touch or taint the goods they regulate. But this is a mistake. Markets leave their mark. Often market incentives erode or crowd out non-market incentives.
The whole lecture is worth a listen/read. His view is that we need to have a proper debate about the morals and what areas of life should be market-free, rather than allow market-creep to distort our lives.
Grace and ambiguity
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
There’s a great article on Tim Keller at Christianity Today.
Here’s one particularly interesting paragraph
The gospel DNA of grace is crucial to Redeemer’s embrace of center-city culture. It gives people permission to try and fail, to mix freely with those of other faiths and morals, and to tolerate ambiguity. Someone who works in advertising or theater may have to serve for many years at projects he or she finds morally ambivalent. Even those who rise to positions of responsibility will find no clearly marked path. Without a grasp of grace, there will be no Christians working in such areas. Keller likes to describe Redeemer’s stance as “cultural presence,” which enhances flavor but doesn’t take over.
This crystalises something that has been floating in the back of my mind. One reason grace is so important (apart from the obvious) is because we live and work in a compromised world — a world in which we may come across situations in which there is no good answer, or we find ourselves in institutions with inherent moral ambiguity. Grace gives us space to act faithfully in a complex world.
Tags: culture, Tim Keller
Things I found this week…
Posted by Paul | Filed under web sights
A couple of interesting links:
I was pleased to see Marilynne Robinson win the Orange prize. The Guardian have a couple of interviews with her — one more literary and one more, well, Calvanist — and an editorial.
Also — I normally get annoyed with blogs that begin “I haven’t read this book, but I wanted to chime in nonetheless”. However, Kyle Strobel at Theology Forum brings an interesting observation to the Wright/Piper discussion of Justification. Turns out that Tom Wright has some support from Jonathan Edwards…
Tags: justification, web sights
O’Conner on the importance of belief
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. … I write with a solid belief in ll the Christian dogmas. I find that this in no way limits my freedom as a writer and that it increases rather than decreases my vision. It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. this may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer to believe nothing is to see nothing. I don’t write to bring anybody a message, … this is not the purpose of a novelist; but the message I find in the life I see is a moral message.
Flannery O’Conner in The Habit of Being
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Posted by Paul | Filed under photos
Tags: photos
respecting the medium
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I was recently re-reading the excellent It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God and came across these quotes from Theodore Prescott
While it is understandable that Christians think a Christian [artistic] expression may act redemptively in culture, this idea founders on our culture’s actual uses of art.
…
I’ve found that Christians tend to have expectations about what art can do, and what it will look like when Christians do it, that ignore the real terrain of art.
This has linked up with a few other thoughts running around my head — both about art and cultural participation more generally: When we are participating in culture we have respect they way that different media, etc. are actually used and work with that.
We have a tendency to see everything as a route for communicating what we believe. But, we have to be wary of coming with our ‘message’, forcing it on some unsuspecting cultural practice and expect the two to work together seamlessly. We have to respect the diversity that God has embedded in our cultural tendencies. We have to realise that not all cultural enterprises are appropriate as message-carriers. Even if they once were, this may no longer be the case in the current ‘terrain’.
As well as Prescott’s example of the visual arts, we might also consider the well-known observation that ‘politics is downstream from culture’. We have to understand what politics ‘is for’, what its limitations are, etc. and act appropriately.
Or perhaps better ‘serve appropriately’. Perhaps we need to look at cultural practices and ask ‘how can we best serve in this area of culture?’ It may be by presenting a clear message; it may be by working quietly for justice; it may be by being provocative.
To come back to our original example, Prescott suggests that
Our culture’s arts are very effective at mediating experiences of beauty, passion, mystery, intellectual engagement, or cultural challenge. But they are not capable of cultural redemption, unless society as a whole shares in the Christian longing for signs of the kingdom.
I think it’s fair to say that God is not divorced from beauty, passion, mystery, intellectual engagement or cultural challenge. So, this is not to suggest that we throw away what we believe, only that we see culture as it is and work appropriately.
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...