As the central focus is to make the unifying oikos link, I can only paint the broad brushstrokes of each part of this triptych. Other than the narratives offered and the geographical examples provided, much of the detail and pointillistic moments for you will be provided by your experience, reading, and context.
Some years ago, the zoologist John Walsh led the rescue of animals trapped or abandoned by the rising waters behind Surinam’s newly built Afobaka dam. He recounted his experiences in his book, Time is Short and the Water Rises.16 The economic and ecological waters respectively threaten to drown our planet metaphorically and literally, as ecumenically more of God’s people live at odds with both one another—whether poor or rich, of faith or not—and with our fellow species. No longer is this just about Antarctic whales or the Nenet and their caribou. It is about the agenda of the world between them, too. “Time is Short . . .” means it is time to read on . . .
1. Caribou are called reindeer in English-speaking Europe and Australia.
2. www.seashepherd.org.
3. Francis, What in God’s Name, 108–10.
4. Francis, Earth, Air, Fire, Water, 75.
5. Francis, Shalom, 138–48.
6. Kirby, Death at Sea World.
7. Costanza, ed., Introduction to Ecological Economics, 179.
8. McFague, Life Abundant, xii.
9. Brandt, ed., North-South.
10. Brueggemann, Living toward a Vision, 40.
11. Francis, Shalom, 19.
12. Francis, Foxes Have Holes, 103–11.
13. Francis, Shalom.
14. McFague, Life Abundant, 35.
15. I have deliberately kept the word “ecumeny” rather than the better known adjective “ecumenical.” I first encountered the frequent use of the word “ecumeny,” as a noun meaning “those who are ecumenical” or more loosely “the outward looking (religious) community,” amongst English- and German-speaking Lutherans. The term was frequently used at the annual German Kirchentag, a city-wide ecumenical festival of lectures, seminars, worship, and other gatherings.
16. Walsh and Gannon, Time is Short.
1 Render to Caesar?
They say, “See Venice—and die!” I nearly did—but that is a story for later.
Historically, Venice virtually sat at the crossroads of the trade routes from China and the rest of Asia, across to Africa, through the Mediterranean, and up into Europe. Because of late-medieval, regional, internecine violence, folks escaped into the shallow Venetian lagoon area, building houses, quays, and market spaces on pilings driven into the sandy or clay banks, hidden just below the surface. It grew to be the world’s greatest trading city.
For half a millennium, the Venetian ducat was the basis of gold currency: it was not two centuries ago that a ducat would buy a closet of fine clothes or a feast for family and friends or a night with the best courtesan. But as in so many rich societies, the laboring poor had been kept in order with a daily evening meal and tiny wages. Those who managed workers had part of their wages paid in easily dried sale (sea-salt), giving rise to their payments being known as salare, hence “salary.” That pure sea salt was a sought-after commodity, its production being controlled by the doge (Venetian ruler) and the merchants, who traded in ducats. Those with just a salare could use their salt to trade with the city’s restaurants, shopkeepers, local fisherman, and the vegetable sellers who came across the lagoon by boat.
Venice was a mercantile trading economy, where the richest could fund explorers such as Marco Polo or the captains of ships from other nations, who subsequently discovered the Americas and East Indies.1 Venice provided a prophetic microcosm of currency trading at different levels.
Learning from my past
As elementary schoolboys with a few pennies each week, we bought bubble gum whose unique selling point was the enclosed, facsimile, historic US bank notes. The phase lasted about a year as weekly, we accrued more “wealth”; occasionally, you might get a $10 or $100 bill, among the more usual early greenbacks. Boys from a neighboring housing project preferred to trade and keep Confederate (not really understanding the politics) to the Union notes my group preferred. There were more of those Confederate collectors, so our bartering power increased—we would give only three Confederate dollars away in return for five Union ones. We began trading other things, like pens and pocket knives, for these mock dollars and, in our childish ways, we were learning lessons “about the way the world worked.”
From the Norman Conquest in 1066, England developed an administrative class separate from the clergy, but increasingly a social hierarchy that rewarded those loyal to the crown with land, wealth, title, and rule over the populace. Deep in English history, we know that the peasant class had subsistence lives without money, living in hovels, scratching a living from the land with occasional handouts from the lord of the manor in return for their agricultural labor and soldiering. People were kept in check by the supply of food. Just like my contemporaries with our bubble gum bank notes, folk learned to trade, with some becoming wealthy and selling either the products of their land or their skills in local markets. What began as a barter economy grew as cities minted their own currencies, while the lords of each manor accrued gold—in similar fashion to Venetians and their ducats. No wonder folklore developed their heroes, such as Robert the Bruce in Scotland or the mythical Robin Hood2 who “robbed the rich and gave to the poor” in England.
It was traders from Italy (e.g., the Lombards) or itinerant Jewish moneylenders, such as Shakespeare’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, who began organizing promissory notes between differently located branches of their family. So someone could pay in gold in one country, traveling home in relative safety and redeeming their wealth later. By 1600, there was a well-established international economy. This was reflected in patterns of trade, the support of exploration and of such international “banking.”
Britain’s Industrial Revolution changed society from an agrarian and market-town economy. Workers flocked to fast-growing cities to work in mills and factories, the majority