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Welcome to Economic Conversion
Central to Jubilee Economics Ministries is the change we make in our lives as we align with sustainable economic practices on Earth, our home. Like spokes from a hub, our activities go out from this center. The spokes are the practices and themes of an economics that is sufficient for everyone in our planetary household, an economics we call jubilee, but which goes by other names as well.
Our understanding of economics invokes the original meaning of the word. "Economy" comes from two Greek words oikos (household) and nomos (rules). Together they form oikonomia, meaning, guidelines for running our planetary home in ways that all people and species in the household have enough. The current meanings and practices of "economics" have strayed so far from this historic root that major conversion is needed in our time in order to express anew this historic wisdom.
Our use of the word "jubilee" refers to economic practices in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, sacred texts whose best economic wisdom both invites and commands sustainable practices in the institutions, businesses, congregations, and governments of our time.
We welcome you, then, to the work of economic conversion.
Proclaim liberty throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof.
- Leviticus 25:10 – also inscribed on the US Liberty Bell
The changes that are now needed in society are at a level that stirs religious passions. The debate will be a religious one whether that is made explicit or not. The whole understanding of reality and the orientation to it are at stake.… [The solutions will be created] by those who can draw forth these deepest energies of the centered self and give them shape and direction. Getting there, if it happens at all, will be a religious event.
- from For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future by Herman Daly and John Cobb
Daly was a senior economist at the World Bank then became senior research scholar at the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs. John Cobb, professor of theology and philosophy at the Claremont Graduate School, is now retired.
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