The Power of Economic Elites

We can, therefore, interpret neoliberalization either as a utopian project to realize a theoretical design for the reorganization of international capitalism or as a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites. In what follows I shall argue that the second of these objectives has in practice dominated. Neoliberalization has not been very effective in revitalizing global capital accumulation, but it has succeeded remarkably well in restoring, or in some instances (as in Russia and China) creating, the power of an economic elite. The theoretical utopianism of neoliberal argument has, I conclude, primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this goal. The evidence suggests, moreover, that when neoliberal principles clash with the need to restore or sustain elite power, then the principles are either abandoned or become so twisted as to be unrecognizable.

David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 19

Neoliberalism: A Definition

Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.

David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 2

Perception Wedded to Matter

It is perception above all which will free us from tragedy. Not the perception of illusion, or of a fantasy that would deny the power of fate and nature. But perception wedded to matter itself, a knowledge that comes to us from the sense of the body, a wisdom born of wholeness of mind and body come together in the heart. The heart dies in us. This is the self we have lost, the self we daily sacrifice.

Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence, 154

The Violence of Love Without Knowledge

All too often, when we love somebody, we don’t accept him or her as what the person effectively is. We accept him or her insofar as this person fits the co-ordinates of our fantasy. We misidentify, wrongly identify him or her, which is why, when we discover that we were wrong, love can quickly turn into violence. There is nothing more dangerous, more lethal for the loved person than to be loved, as it were, for not what he or she is, but for fitting the ideal.

Slavoj Zizek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema

Happiness and Death

Call no man happy until he is dead.

Aeschylus, quoted by A. MacIntyre in After Virtue, 32

Church and World

The church–world duality is not a given, but rather a discovery made possible by discernment by Christians across time concerning how they must live to be faithful to the Gospel.

Stanley Hauerwas, Hauerwas on “Hauerwas and the Law”: Trying to Have Something to Say

Early Christian Ethics

Christians in the second century tended to be more Judaistic than they or their successors cared to admit. Tobit rather than Luke proved to be the handbook of early Christian ethics. The Sermon on the Mount was read but in practice ignored. Reform of society, even as a sign of preparation for the Coming proved to be beyond the imagination of the time.

W.H.C. Frend, Early Christianity and Society

Liberating Desire

The crucifixion of Jesus with its pneumatic sequel is the final liberation of desire into the divine union that all desire is groping toward.

Sebastian Moore, The Crisis of an Ethic Without Desire

New Media, New Meaning

A preacher who confines himself to considering how a medium can increase his audience will miss the significant question: In what sense do new media alter what is meant by religion, by church, even by God?

Neil Postman, Technopoly, 19

Technology of Numbers

To say that someone should be doing better work because he has an IQ of 134, or that someone is a 7.2 on a sensitivity scale, or that this man’s essay on the rise of capitalism is an A – and that man’s is a C + would have sounded like gibberish to Galileo or Shakespeare or Thomas Jefferson. If it makes sense to us, that is because our minds have been conditioned by the technology of numbers so that we see the world differently than they did. Our understanding of what is real is different. Which is another way of saying that embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another.

Neil Postman, Technopoly, 13