Thank you so much for the Repossessing Virtue show. It was a helpful reminder to me from an array of your interesting and wise guests. When thinking about the "economic crisis" and listening to this show, I realized that this "crisis" is overlapping myriad other crises — moral, spiritual, personal — in our lives. In the midst of this uncertainty parents have lost children. Children have lost parents. Many of us were feeling adrift, lost, and worried about the "big questions" and small questions in life before this economic storm hit. What is so helpful and beautiful about this program is that the wisdom from your guests can feed the soul and calm the mind in the landscape of life.

This program reminded me of the response of the church in Latin America to the poor, pre-liberation theology. A biologist tells me I have the wrong story. A Buddhist tells me that life is suffering. How different is that from a priest telling a campesino to bear his cross with nobility? It lets an economic system that caused this crisis go unchallenged. No mention was made that perhaps unregulated free-market capitalism not only will never care for the environment, it doesn't do such a good job taking care of humans either. There was no discussion of social sin as in critical theology.

An economic system that leads to destroying this many lives is not ethical. Instead, personal psychotherapy is offered in which the person is considered as an individual separate from the economic context. Do people need "stress reduction strategies"? I think they need jobs. We as people of faith and charity and justice have to be clear and articulate enough in our economic critique to work for changing capitalism to a more humane system. Along with more "virtue," we need more critical theology.

It has been a crisis for our family this past year but especially these past several months.

Yet as I have had time to reflect, it was not the job loss that was the real crisis, it was all that was lost in the striving to save my job. The now bankrupt company I was working for gave me the illusion that it was in my power to change what eventually became inevitable.

During those seven final months of over-working and keeping insane hours, I was finally let go. And so was everyone else in the company!

My months of unemployment were not a vacation, but in so many ways it was so much more meaningful and reflective than the work I had been doing. At first, in jest, I renamed my unemployment, "a poor man's sabbatical." But by the end of it, and I have found work again, it was not really a joke to me. I learned and thought through many things I have not had time to think about for a long time. The piano has become a wonderful friend to me again as it had been for so many prior to this year of stress. I learned how little my wife really cares about money. I learned that a good idea one day is still a good idea many days later. It also occurred to me, that if my faith sees worry as a virtue, then it is a worthless faith and not worth a single tithe or restriction.

I believe the kind of choice I made in going back to work is an indication that this personal time out of work was successful. Not just to me but also to my career path. I feel good, that this Crisis was not wasted on me. Because as your guest said, "a Crisis is a terrible thing to waste."

I had a choice between two different jobs. I ended up choosing the job which included a significant reduction in pay over a job with more pay. The company that was paying more has not slowed down its sales in this recession. The other company is really just getting started.

The reasons and scenarios are too involved to explain and this decision was by no means easy to make. At first I was almost obviously leaning towards the higher paying job. As I considered the advice of my brothers, my mom, my wife and her parents, the decision was still not so clear.

But as I thought about all the clear thoughts I had about my future over the months of looking for work and as I compared those conclusions to the two particular jobs I was being offered. Something clicked. I also noticed the only the highest advise I was given surfaced to the top. It was the parts of their advice that contained their deepest love and respect for me that seemed to line up with my decision the most.

One morning I woke up early and with enthusiasm, waiting for my wife to wake up. I shared with her my consistent and clear thoughts about why I wanted the lesser paying job. She felt my joy and freely supported the decision. I didn't bother bouncing the decision off anyone else and just made the phone calls first thing.

It was not a decision to work for some non-profit or some job helping kids, it was just another computer job with its own set of challenges, designed to make the company money.

But it was the people I was going to be working with that made the decision. It was the goals for my role in the company and how those goals fit into what new goals we hope to have for ourselves one day. It was a company that I felt was going to let me sit at the table and contribute as a recent guest of yours talked about.

This is my personal story, but collectively, with evidence from your show, I fully sense this to be a very positive collective story. It makes me feel like the whole collapse is a good thing as it makes way for hopefully a more sustainable capitalism 3.0.

My story and the tone of real people, gives me hope that perhaps, in the very long run, this crisis, might just prove to be economically advantageous. Well, that is, if our leaders and decision makers don't waste the whole crisis on self perpetuating political capital or repeat the same mistakes under some new age of ideology. I like what your one guest said about how they are handling this crisis personally in a biological way. A job is not about the money or even the nature of the job itself, it's better to think about it more in terms of what it brings to your bodies.

"From great struggle comes great growth" and "we cannot know true happiness without sorrow" are in part two themes I heard today and throughout the Speaking of Faith series. I also heard a series of speakers in harmony and that I found troubling. It is one thing to encourage individuals to be giving and charitable and quite another to enforce it.

I awoke to one speaker suggesting that we were just on the edge of bringing about equity to the poor and now that economy has tanked we should not give up that goal. First, there is no evidence that we were just on the brink of bringing equity to the poor and secondly continuing to increase public assistance at this time may very well bring about our financial demise. This is not to say we should not be charitable but forced charity in the form of increased taxes raises some very serious moral questions. Is it moral to punish those that have been responsible by rewarding those that have not? Is it moral to have created a system — though well intentioned — that has increased government dependence?

It is not the role of government to nurture, care and inspire us… that is the role best served by our respective faiths, families and communities. A government that looks to fill that role is one that has the greatest of potential to no longer be well intentioned but wholly self-motivated. Does no one see that we are walking down the path Orwell laid out in both Animal Farm and 1984?

We are very much on a moral precipice. Do we want a government that guarantees the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness or one that portends to guarantee the equity of results of those rights and pursuits by punishing some to reward others?

Too long those who have worked hard and have found some measure of success have been made to feel guilty by those who seek to gain power by creating envy in the heart of those that have not found the same success. When do we call into question the morality of those that have fostered this envy for their own gain?

Fire is a tool much like the government. Feed the fire too much and it will rise up and burn you.

I think the real moral challenge is to face up to our real cognitive failings, and to freshly explore our great ignorance of the world we live in. It's exploring our ignorance of nature that everyone seems to shy away from, though, preferring the made-up realities of our own fertile imaginations.

It led us to trust expert advice about what was good for the economy, that alert people knew we should not have trusted. It's also sending us right back to the same people again, and the same warmed over mistaken stories about taking ever-increasing control over the world around us, to repeat the complete failure of that way of perceiving the world.

I'm an explorer, find it fun, have lots to share. There are a great many kinds of being in the natural world, and only a few of them can be captured by a human mind. It's exploring our own ignorance of nature's many other kinds of being that leads us to appreciate what we share the planet with, and in such deep trouble with. Nature is not a passive bystander in this relationship, but an active dance partner we are not recognizing the moves of, and so stepping on our toes. We should learn about the other living things that are our partners are here!

Speaking of Faith starts our week with reflection, insights, and inspiration. What a fine array of different thinkers responding to Krista's great questions.

I think of the themes that were present in more than one interview.

Suffering
light - dark - light
compassion

...joyfully participate in the sorrows of the world and everything changes - J. Campbell

The moth shall fly into the flame!