I've read Book of James through in its entirety for the last couple days. What a wonderful book! This book gets down to the nitty-gritty, showing that real faith is not merely intellectual. It acts. Real faith causes us to help orphans, to care for widows, to keep ourselves unspotted from the world. I'm also amazed that the book shows that God cares about economics--things like wages for laborers in the fields. Here's James 5:1-5:

Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers, who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. 

Rod Dreher interviewed writer Joel Salatin in his book Crunchy Cons about problems with mainstream conservatism.

Salatin: "One of the problems with conservatives is that we tend to be very Western in our thinking. Greco-Roman-linear-segmented-compartmentalized thinking. We in the conservative community love the scientific method, double-blind studies, that sort of thing, as opposed to the Eastern mind-set, which thinks more holistically, and more along the lines of 'we' than 'I.'"

Dreher: "You'll recall that that's what British economist E. F. Schumacher found.... He discovered that thinking of economic questions as distinct from human society, with all its variables, could result in greater material output, but at the cost of a greater harmony needed to sustain the happiness and well-being of the community."

Salatin: "Conservatives tend to ask how we can be more efficient, not how we can be more effective. You can be very efficient at the wrong thing."

Some highlights from Rod Dreher's "Manifesto" in Crunchy Cons:

• "Modern conservatism has become too focused on material conditions, and insufficiently concerned with the character of society. The point of life is not to become a more satisfied shopper."
  
• "The economy must be made to serve humanity's best interests, not the other way around."
  
• "Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government."
  
• "We believe that culture is more important than politics, and that neither America's wealth nor our liberties will long survive a culture that no longer lives by what Russell Kirk identified as 'the Permanent Things'--those eternal moral norms necessary to civilized life, and which are taught by all the world's great wisdom traditions."
  
• "A conservatism that does not recognize the need for restraint, for limits, and for humility is neither helpful to individuals and society nor, ultimately, conservative. This is particularly true with respect to the natural world."
  
• "A good rule of thumb: Small and Local and Old and Particular are to be preferred over Big and Global and New and Abstract."
  
• "Appreciation of aesthetic quality--that is, beauty--is not a luxury, but key to the good life."
  
• "The cacophony of contemporary popular culture makes it hard to discern the call of truth and wisdom. There is no area in which practicing asceticism is more important."
  
• "Politics and economics will not save us. If we are to be saved at all, it will be through living faithfully by the Permanent Things, preserving these ancient truths in the choices we make in everyday life. In this sense, to conserve is to create anew."

The first step toward overcoming our detachment is to turn our homes into sites of production, not just consumption. ... Simple acts such as making our own bread or our own music can become significant ways to reshape the way we approach the material world. Making things gives the maker an appreciation for the labor involved in producing what he consumes. It also increases our sense that we are not merely spectators of life - for example, hours spent passively watching and listening to entertainment that others make - but active and creative participants in the material world.

William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire

If there is no household or community economy, then family members and neighbors are no longer useful to one another, and . . . family and community fails, and people fall into dependence on exterior economies and organizations. The hegemony of professionals and professionalism erects itself on local failure, and from then on the locality exists merely as a market for consumer goods and as a source of "raw material," human and natural. The local schools no longer serve the local community; they serve the  government's economy and the economy's government. Unlike the local community, the government and the economy cannot be served with affection, but only with professional zeal or professional boredom. . . . This love cannot exist, because it makes no sense, apart from the love of a place and a community.

Wendell Berry, "The Work of Local Culture," from What Are People For?

The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry.

Wendell Berry, "The Pleasures of Eating," from What Are People For?

The nearly intolerable irony in our dissatisfaction [in our lives] is that we have removed pleasure from our work in order to remove "drudgery" from our lives. If I could pick any rule of industrial economics to receive a thorough re-examination by our people, it would be the one that says that all hard physical work is "drudgery" and not worth doing. . . .

That [harvest] can be drudgery is obvious. . . . But for me, and I think for most of the men and women who have been my companions in this work, it has not been drudgery. None of us would say that we take pleasure in all of it all of the time, but we do take pleasure in it, and sometimes the pleasure can be intense and clear. Many of my dearest memories come from these times of hardest work.

The [harvest] is the most protracted social occasion of our year. Neighbors work together . . . There is much talk. . . There is much laughter . . . And there are memories.

The crew to which I belong is the product of kinships and friendships going far back. . . As we work we have before us not only the present crop and the present fields, but other crops and other fields remembered. . . . Old stories are retold; the dead and the aabsent are remembered. . . . Such talk in barns and at row ends must go back without interruption to the first farmers. How long it may continue is an uneasy question; not much longer perhaps, but we do not know. We only know that while it last it can carry us deeply into our shared life and the happiness of farming.

On many days we have had somebody's child or somebody's children with us, playing in the barn or around the patch while we worked, and these have been our best days. One of the most regrettable things about the industrialization of work is the segregation of children . . . [But] the small scale and handwork of our [harvest accomodates their play]. In their play, the children learn to work; they learn their elders and their country. And the presence of playing children means invariably that the grown-ups play too from time to time.

God's pleasure in all things must be respected by us in our use of things. . . This bountiful and lovely thought that all creatures are pleasing to God . . . is unthinkable from the point of view of an economy divorced from pleasure, such as the one we have now, which completely discounts the capacity of people to be affectionate toward what they do and what they use and where they live and the other people and creatures with whom they live.

It may be argued that our whole society is more devoted to pleasure than any whole society ever was in the past, that we support in fact a great variety of pleasure industries and that these are thriving as never before. But that would seem only to prove my point. That there can be pleasure industries at all, exploiting our apparently limitless ability to be pleased, can only mean that our economy is divorced from pleasure and that pleasure is gone from our workplaces and our dwelling places. . . .

More and more, we take for granted that work must be destitute of pleasure. More and more, we assume that if we want to be pleased we must wait until evening, or the weekend, or vacation, or retirement. More and more, our farms and forests resemble our factories and offices, which in turn more and more resemble prisons--why else should we be so eager to escape them? . . . We are defeated at work because our work gives us no pleasure. We are defeated at home because we have no pleasaant work there. We turn to the pleasure industries for relief from our defeat, and are aagain defeated, for the pleasure industries can thrive and grow only upon our dissatisfaction with them.

Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved, finially mysterious beauty and grace of this world that we did not make, that has no price? Where is our sanity but there? Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world?

Wendell Berry, "Economy and Pleasure," from What Are People For?

No individual can lead a good or satisfying life under the rule of competition. . . . No community can succeed except by limiting somehow the competitiveness of its members. One cannot maintain one's "competitive edge" if one helps other people. . . . [Competitive advantages are] not thought of by people intent on loving their neighbors as themselves. And it is impossible to imagine that there can be any reconciliation between local and national competitiveness and global altruism. The ambition to "feed the world" or "feed the hungry," rising as it does out of the death struggle of farmer with farmer, proposes not the filling of stomachs, but the engorgement of "the bottom line."

Wendell Berry, "Economy and Pleasure," from What Are People For?

The great question that hovers over [the issues of urban unempolyment and rural destruction as a result of government agricultural policies] is the question of what people are FOR. IS their greatest dignity in unemployment? Is the obsolescence of human beings now our social goal? One would conclude so from our attitude toward work . . . and from our rush toward mechanization, automation, and computerization. In a country that puts an absolute premium on labor-saving measures, short workdays, and retirement, why should there be any surprise at permanence of unemployment and welfare dependency? Those are only different names for our national ambitions.

Wendell Berrry, "What Are People For?"

As a measure of how far we have "progressed" in our industrial economy, let me quote a part of a sentence from the prayer "For Every Man in His Work" from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer: "Deliver us, we beseech thee, in our several callings, from the service of mammon, that we may do the work which thou givest us to do, in truth, in beauty, and in righteousness, with singleness of heart as thy servants, and to the benefit of our fellow men." What is astonishing about that prayer is that it is a relic. Throughout the history of the industrial revolution, it has become steadily less prayable. The industrial nations are now divided, almost entirely, into a professional or executive class that has not the least intention of workinig in truth, beauty, and righteousness, as God's servants, or to the benefit of their fellow men, and an underclass that has no choice in the matter. Truth, beauty, and righteousness now have, and can have, nothing to do with the economic life of most people.

Wendell Berry, "God and Country," from What Are People For?

It is hardly a "free-market economy" that the Bible prescribes. Large accumulations of land were, and are, forbidden because the dispossession and privation of some cannot be an acceptable or normal result of the economic activity of others, for that destroys a people as a people; it destroys the community. Usury was, and is, forbidden . . . for that is contrary to neighborliness; it destroys the community. And the greed that destroys the community also destroys the land. What the Bible proposes is a moral economy, the standard of which is the health of properties belonging to God.