My relationship with Barry Shelley has brought so many good things my way. Partly it’s because he’s a political economist with whom I’ve checked out many economic ideas. Even more it’s his desire to share with me anything he has or knows that can help me do better what he knows I love doing: working on a jubilee, One Earth economy and having it work on all of us. He’s colleagial and appreciative. He’s a good fit with his new job with Oxfam America and their work on the interface of agriculture and economies worldwide.
In addition to the article by Harvey Cox I quoted in the previous blog, Barry copied me an article by David Loy,“The Religion of the Market,” in which Loy says that it is “apparent that the Market is becoming the first truly world religion, binding all corners of the globe more and more tightly into a worldview and set of values whose religious role we overlook only because we insist on seeing them as ‘secular.’” (Note: Scholars may be interested to know that Loy’s essay appears also in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, but it is available in totality only to subscribers.)
This article, and others Loy has written, add valuable perspective for me because he writes as a practicing Zen Buddhist interested in showing the social implications of Buddhist teachings. He perceives Market Religion to have surpassed, not only Buddhism, but all the world religions in its religious impact on the world.
Now that you’ve heard from both Harvey Cox and David Loy on The Market as religion, and I’ve acknowledged how much they help me see how the grip in which the Multi Earth worldview holds us is religious, what are your thoughts? Or perhaps you’ve thought of our daily economic choices as religious ones for a long time.
Lee Van Ham Posted on 
It may have been the gorilla, Ishmael, (Dan Quinn’s book Ishmael) who first burst open the container in my mind that equated “civilization” and “human history.” Separating them sent me exploring like an animal first released from an enclosure. My mind began to laugh; my heart elevated. I am ready to speak loudly through the megaphone: “We humans contribute our best capacities to Earth through our wild, full, and loving humanness, not through the rules of the civilization project underway since 10,000 BCE.”