Geophilos: Issue 5, Autumn 2002

GLOBALLY, change is in the air. Governments accept the need for some kind of a restructuring of the economic rules, and are largely driven to this position on ecological grounds. The material and cultural impoverishment of the largest section of the world’s population has not become an overriding reason to review the rules of politics. Nonetheless, people are fervently engaged in a discussion on how to reshape the world order to a more or less degree.

Religions needs to be more deeply engaged in this discourse. Arguably, spiritual leaders are best placed to offer the disinterested leadership which disputing groups need if a common language is to be defined as the first step towards a new social compact. But theological language may be part of the problem that first needs to be clarified. Sir Kenneth Jupp, for example, reminds us that the sacred texts on which three of the great religions rely are no longer correctly designated. The Old Testament was actually called the Old Covenant. That covenant was the first recorded land deal between God and a nation. Strings were attached to the land deal. Was it a pure accident that covenant was mistranslated as testament?

The Old Covenant embodied Near Eastern practices on indebtedness and landlessness. The priests and princes of the earliest civilisations understood that, to ensure a balanced society, they needed to employ a mechanism for cancelling non-commercial debts and restoring land to its original users. These traditions find their theological expression in Leviticus. Today, the popular discussions on debt fail to draw on the theological texts; and people are almost totally silent on the issue of land restoration.

Contents

• Editor's Introduction (Download PDF)
  
  
• Debt Forgiveness and Redemption (Download PDF)
  Where do the Churches now Stand?
  Michael Hudson
  
  
• The Covenant with God (Download PDF)
  The Jubilee & the Gospel to the Poor
  Kenneth Jupp
  
  
• The Sacred Rule (Download PDF)
  How to Remove the Globe from Globalisation
  Fred Harrison
  
  
• Geopolitics and the Social Sciences (Download PDF)
  Macro-parasitism and the Design of Remedial Programs
  David Smiley
  
  
• Sustainable Development: Definitions, Principles, Policies (Download PDF)
  Herman E. Daly
  
  
• Single Tax City (Download PDF)
  Georgist activism in British Columbia (1885-1935)
  Mary Rawson
  
  
• INTERROGATION - Economic Reform
  
  
  • Introduction (Download PDF)
    
    
  • Land Reform in Brazil by Geoffrey Lee (Download PDF)
    
    
  • New Zealand - The Misguided Experiment by Francis Smith (Download PDF)
    
    
• BOOK REVIEW: Digging the Dirt on UK Land Rights - Fred Harrison (Download PDF)
  
  
• BOOK REVIEW: Land and Identity - Fred Foldvary (Download PDF)
  
  
• BOOK REVIEW: Plugging the Cracks in Culture - Fred Harrison (Download PDF)