Late capitalist "harvest festival"

1. A capitalist venture is viable if it costs you less to make your product than to sell it.

2. A capitalist venture is viable if you are able to sell products that are either of better quality, altogether cheaper or for some other reason more desirable than those your competitors are making.

3. The curent order rewards individuals primarily for making their workforce available or for investing their assets. In some countries, the system will also reward individuals who are unable to find work or who do not have assets. This is by no means a universal provision, and countless individuals are unable to find work and do not have assets. To these individuals, employment in slave-like conditions is arguably more desirable than no employment at all, though not desirable in absolute terms.

4. Manufacturing of hard commodities is mostly done in countries able to offer cheap labour. CEOs of western companies who wish to uphold the welfare of their western workforce (SIEMENS is a case in point) neverthless delocalise some of their production to countries where labour is cheaper in order to remain competitive and able to sell their products and services globally.

5. Using the phrase of Charles Leadbeater, a sizeable portion of Westerners are "living on thin air", by largely working in the service and knowledge economy.

6. Even in the knowledge economy, productivity is essential, thus employees work long hours with excessive dedication as the need to be competitive is pressed on them by management. Many young and committed professionals are tempted to throw in the towel under the pressure.

7. In a recession, a number of sincere theologians advocate investing instead of giving. The argument is that many jobs, and the welfare of those who hold them, are dependent of a non-essential economy of luxury. This "non-essential economy of luxury" is the first to suffer in a recession as people scale back their expenses. According to them, it follows that the right thing to do is to invest in these businesses who struggle to sell their services and, in these economic circumstances, do not have easy access to credit

(cf. http://www.dur.ac.uk/StChads/docs/golden-cassidy.pdf ).

8. We are in a world full of abundance, yet the way in which we make this abundance available is seriously flawed. We simply cannot continue to reward only those individuals who have assets or who are able to find employment, because this leaves a huge number of people out and it is not getting better.

Perfect contrition vs. perfect despair

At some point in the past year, I really thought that God was asking me to walk away from my Ph.D. thesis, burn all my bridges professionally and start anew somewhere in India. It would have been a ballsy thing to do, because failing to submit would have had very serious repercussions for my department - basically, the department cannot receive funding for two years if more than 40% of funded candidates do not submit, and we were already fairly close to those 40%. I would have been blacklisted forever if I did that, but in my mind it was a bit of an Abraham and Isaac moment.

I ended up not walking away from my Ph.D. and passing my defense a few months later. I was never really sure that this was a real call from God, but I wasn't entirely sure that it wasn't. I tried to discern whether I should have taken this seriously, but deep down I knew I probably wouldn't have done it anyway. At some point I sort-of-prayed that I could not even repent it, since I had no intention of altering my trajectory, or "converting".

I was walking from one place to the other chewing things around in my mind, and I thought that St Peter would probably have given anything to undo his denial, he would have cut off a limb for a chance to undo it, surely he must have had perfect contrition... But we are forced to observe that he did not alter his trajectory when the cock crowed, he did not run after the maid, saying "umm, sorry, I made a mistake, I do know this guy after all", Peter did not have perfect contrition, he weeped out of perfect despair.

I realise that I'm on shaky grounds here. There is undeniably infinite value in "perfect contrition" which is a Roman Catholic concept which states that basically you really should resolve to never sin again, and do everything you can to undo the sin as soon as you can when this is possible. But by the time Peter was forgiven he probably still didn't have perfect contrition, and he had no idea whether, given the chance, he would have the courage not to deny his Lord again. My guess is that he lived with perfect despair for a while. A man in perfect despair who loved Jesus and knew himself to be loved, not insignificantly. A man who was given the power to forgive or retain sins. The one stone on which the church was built.