Balance
[Rod Dreher  03/21 10:09 AM]

Steve from Mississippi, who teaches at a Protestant seminary, writes:

Your thoughts on environmentalism strike, it seems to me, the proper balance. My recycling wife, who single-handedly keeps our house tilting "green," would rise up and call you blessed.

Your comment about the evangelical Christian and the idea of the world as merely our resource is unsurprising to me. Many things about evangelical spirituality (which produced me, so I don't bash it) are way too other-worldly.

Also, your thoughts about the necessity for the market forces to sense a non-market pressure (or at least a pressure that forces environmental concerns to become a market concerns) is a much needed remedy to purely laissez-faire capitalism. The "walling-off" of the market from other human concerns strikes me as as a kind of economic gnosticism, in which economics is a mystery which one must bow to, rather than a merely part of the human endeavor to have a sustainable and humane world.

That doesn't, of course, imply that a regulative regime is the answer (which is the leftist agenda). The alternative is, I think, serious minded conversation about what really makes for a good life in the most holistic (and holy) sense.

Thanks again for continuing to press that kind of conversation.