Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Radically Dependent

We need, then, first of all to reconceive ourselves. We need to think differently about who we are. The eighteenth-century individual, isolated from other people except through contracts and from nature except as the resource base from which to amass wealth, is false according to the picture of reality current in our time. The postmodern picture sees us as part and parcel of the earth, not only as dependent on it and its processes but since we are high on the food chain, as radically dependent. ... We are simply not who the reigning economic model says we are, so says our current story. We may be greedy, but more basically, we are needy, terribly needy.
Sallie McFague: Life Abundant, p. 102.

This book as actually rather brilliant. So far, McFague has given an analysis of the current economic model and how it is unable to provide humans with true fulfilment, and how it is responsible for the sorry state of planet earth. Even if I am not sure about the use of that term postmodern (is there anything this word cannot mean??!?) I think she is very right in saying that those that advocate free-market capitalism today are living in yesterdays world. Too bad they still hold the power.

I really look forward to the theological chapters that make up the second half of this book.

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