Fall 2009

Money

Introduction: Money

The Fall, 2009 issue of Communio is dedicated to the theme of “Money.” In his Encyclical Letter Caritas in veritate, Pope Benedict XVI called for “further and deeper reflection on the meaning of the economy and its goals.” . . .

Read More

Value and Equivalence: The Role of Monotheism in Early Economic Systems

Giorgio Buccellati

“The relevance of monotheism to the introduction of pricing (and money) is in the affirmation of values, not primarily in the implementation of techniques. The unifying thread is the posture of facing rather than of seizing.”

Is Usury Still a Sin?

Thomas Storck

“The Church has not changed her teaching on usury and one can make a reasonable argument for the validity of the intrinsic injustice of usury itself.”

An Ethic of Attentiveness: The Rediscovery of Oikonomia

Mark Shiffman

“Economics recasts our imagination of the life of production and consumption in the image of the unlimited acquisition of money rather than in the image of choices about goods that contribute to a good life.”

Healing the Hidden Wound: The Theology of the Body in Wendell Berry’s Remembering

Nathan Schlueter

“By making detailed what is spare in the myth of the fall, and making concrete what is abstract in the Theology of the Body, Remembering brings us tangibly in touch with the primordial memory of wholeness that slumbers in every human heart.”

On Money

Charles Péguy

“A tradition, risen from the depths of the race, a history, an absolute, an honor demanded that this stick for a chair was well made. All the parts in the chair that were not seen were exactly just as perfectly made as the parts that were seen. This is the very principle of the cathedrals.”