My dear husband, whose other addiction (besides West Wing) is a handful of wonky blogs, pointed me to this lovely commentary on the subprime loan crisis, as seen in the gospel of Luke's Parable of the Unjust Steward.
Sometimes we expect Jesus to be all about the foolishness of the gospel, but at least in this parable, as the commentator points out, he seems to be displaying some good old-fashioned wisdom of the worldly kind -- namely that sometimes you only get a good bottom line by putting people before the bottom line.
I wonder what Robert Reich would do with this. His recent book Supercapitalism is making a point that preahcers have been saying for some time now: that when economic factors become the only way a society measures what is good, and when people are encouraged only to behave as consumers, we get a pretty wretched society as a result.
