Repossessing Virtue Project
Mapping Your Voices on the Economic Downturn
Your Voices, Your Stories
Selected Reading
Trusting our Deeper Knowing: On Cataclysms, Contemplation, and Circles of Trust
Read Parker Palmer's essay reflecting on tumultuous times and the need for circles of trust.
About the Project
Over the past several months, we've been exploring the spiritual and moral aspects of the economic downturn and flaws that have been exposed in financial systems. Online and on air, we've generated a challenging, edifying, cross-cultural conversation called Repossessing Virtue. We continue to look for fresh thinking and language for talking about what has happened and why — not just in terms of financial tools and strategies but in terms of personal conscience and values. We're looking for practical resources for individual and communal evaluation and renewal, moving forward from this crisis.
In exploring the moral, spiritual, and practical aspects of the economic downturn, we've asked past guests, listeners, and other familiar voices for their wisdom and insight about the changing economic climate.
Project-related Shows
In a few breathtaking months, we've culturally moved from seeing Wall Street as an icon of thriving civil society to discussing its workings with book titles like House of Cards and Animal Spirits. As part of our ongoing Repossessing Virtue series, we look at what science is learning about trust, fair play, and empathy — and what these qualities have to do with human character and economics.
We're bringing the voices of our listeners into the conversation we've been building online and on-air since the economic downturn began last year. Many are grappling with the shame that comes in American culture with the loss of a job, and many are seeking community in old places and new. For some, economic instability — a kind of life on the edge — is not new. They've been cultivating virtues of patience, self-examination, service and good humor that might help us all.
As the global economic crisis began to unfold this past fall, we wanted to respond immediately, in our way. We began to conduct an online conversation parallel to but distinct from our culture's more sustained focus on economic scenarios. For in each of our lives, whoever we are, very personal scenarios are unfolding that confront us with core questions of what matters to us and what sustains us. We made a list of our guests across the years who we thought might speak to this in fresh and compelling ways.
We explore human and spiritual aspects of economic downturn with a wise public intellectual of our time, the Quaker author and educator Parker Palmer. He works with people from all walks of life at the intersection of spiritual, professional, and social change, and stresses the need to acknowledge the inner life of human beings as a source of reality and power.
A few years ago, journalist Pankaj Mishra pursued the social relevance of the Buddha's thought across India and Europe, Afghanistan and America. He emerged with a startling critique of Western political economy that is even more resonant today as he pursued the social relevance of the Buddha's core questions: Do desiring and acquiring make us happy? Does large-scale political change really address human suffering?
Repossessing Virtue Project