JourneyOnline
Kathryn Tanner set out to convince people of just one thing when she delivered the Rollie Busch lecture in Brisbane in August.
Dr Tanner is convinced that Christianity has the potential to offer a whole new vision of economic life; one opposed to the inhumanities of the present global economic system and offering direction in trying times, a practical path to a better world, to a brighter economic future for everyone.
"The whole Christian story is a story of economy, with every basic Christian claim making its contribution to it," Dr Tanner said.
"Embedded within the fundamentals of the Christian story about God and God’s relations with the world is an account of a kind of system for the production and circulation of goods, starting with God, the highest good, and extending those goods of God’s own life to the world, from the beginning of the story – creation – through to its end, redemption.
"The principles by which these goods are produced and distributed – the basic principles that underlie all the ways that goods are offered to creatures by God – seem, to say the least, decidedly odd.
"Fundamentally at stake in this Christian story are new principles for the production and circulation of the good and what they are to mean for human life as God intends it; principles that seem radically contrary to our usual economic understanding."
Download the full text of the Rollie Busch lecture here.
Photo : Kathryn Tanner bringing a radical new economic agenda
