Today’s New York Times finds the right verb for this front-page story (emphasis added):
With a Swagger, Wallets Out, Wall Street Dares to Celebrate
As unemployment remains high and many more scrap to make ends meet here — and whole nations totter at the brink — corporations hoard their cash from record profits while the investment pros at Wall Street firms continue to live on a planet largely removed from the rest of us.
Even plastic surgeons reap the benefits of such largess. The Times quotes one woman who runs a Brooklyn insurance company:
(She) says that over the last two years she cut her annual spending on cosmetic surgery in half, to about $3,000. She is now spending at pre-2008 levels.
“I have to meet a lot of people, and this is part if investing in myself,” she said.
Take a moment to compare what you find in the Wall Street story with an insightful op-ed by Harvard Professor David B. Hall. His topic: a reassessment of the Puritans and their contributions to public life in the colonies. He notes:
The colonists hungered to recreate the ethics of love and mutual obligation spelled out in the New Testament. Church members pledged to respect the common good and to care for one another. Celebrating the liberty they had gained by coming to the New World, they echoed St. Paul’s assertion that true liberty was inseparable from the obligation to serve others.
Hall, who has a book on the Puritans coming out in April, argues that much of our understanding of the Puritans is constricted by our incomplete view of their lives. A fuller understanding of Puritan life is instructive for us today as we view our growing inequality and disconnection from one another:
… our civil society depends, as theirs did, on linking an ethics of the common good with the uses of power. In our society, liberty has become deeply problematic: more a matter of entitlement than of obligation to the whole. Everywhere, we see power abused, the common good scanted. Getting the Puritans right won’t change what we eat on Thanksgiving, but it might change what we can be thankful for and how we imagine a better America.
Hall’s essay grabs my attention because he does not suggest the kind of quasi-historical nostalgia for the colonies and a “Christian” nation that distorts our public discourse today. We are better off understanding the Puritans in all their complexities and contradictions, so that we can better understand our own — and respond accordingly.
Signs of Grace 