Bill McKibben ‘s Deep Economy yields the subtitle: The Weath of Communities and the Durable Future.  “Communities” there is pretty clearly a substitution for “Nations” in Adam Smith’s classic economics title.  The “Limits to Growth” has apparently overtaken “Nations”,  and so “Communities”, smaller, local,  interdependent co-ops,  seem to be the necessary alternative to nations and economies seemingly intent on proving the inevitability of progress,  the great liberal dream.  The limitations of that “No Limits” dream have become all too clear,  and yet our nations’s people of faith have attached themselves to that false narrative instead of holding fast to a far more ancient foundation of relationship to the earth and it’s marvelous ecosystem.

The keys to building a new economy is not so much “A” New Economy,  but lots of them.  Local.  Personal.  Interdependent.  Think co-ops. Think durability.  And begin to think differently about theology. And begin to think about the Bible again.  But as it has always been,  the Bible is a communal book.  It needs to be  interpreted in community,  just as our economies now need to be envisioned and implemented.  And I NEED that community.  I need a community alive to what has grounded it since the beginning of creation.  In the West,  and in nearly all of its theologies,  we have lost touch with that,  and so we have been taught to think of the earth in an “I-IT” relationship rather than the “I-Thou” (from Buber).  The needed restoration of an eco-centric theology needs eco-theological communities to create this,  and so an ecotheology that incorporates economies that recognize and operate based on the assumption that there is no economy without ecology,  and thus no theology worth its “logy”  without ecology that drives a just economy.  How have we traveled so far from that basic story and relationship?