Category: Blog Series
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Insert Coin | Is Church a Game?
The ever-brilliant Believer Magazine took ‘Games’ as its theme for the September issue. It’s left me with some thoughts I want to share, probably over the course of a few posts. One of the main articles, by Paul La Farge, was an exploration of Dungeons and Dragons, which, in typical Believer style, meant a gorgeous…
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The 3rd Economy: Gift, Market and Plunder [5] | Power Discourses | Mission | Plunder
[ Gift, Market and Plunder [1] ] | [ Gift, Market and Plunder [2] ] [ Gift, Market and Plunder [3] ] | [ Gift, Market and Plunder [4] ] In the third post in this series – in which I am exploring an update to the ideas of gift presented in the book –…
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The 3rd Economy: Gift, Market and Plunder [4] | Urban Implications
[ Gift, Market and Plunder [1] ] | [ Gift, Market and Plunder [2] ] | [ Gift, Market and Plunder [3] ] OK, sorry if the last post was hard work. But sometimes you have to mine deep… To summarize for those who didn’t make it: Veblen identified the ‘leisure class’ as those who…
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The 3rd Economy: Gift, Market and Plunder [3] | Relationships and Transactions | Hunters and Plunderers
[ Gift, Market and Plunder [1] ] | [ Gift, Market and Plunder [2] ] In the previous two posts I’ve begun reflecting on Thorstein Veblen’s Conspicious Consumption thesis about ‘the leisure class’ – a group of people he identifies who feel that work is somehow below them: ‘The upper (leisure) classes are by custom…
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The 3rd Economy: Gift, Market and Plunder [2] | Individual Ownership and The Root of Warfare
In the previous post I began to set out some further thoughts on gift, springing from my reading of Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 satire Conspicuous Consumption. I want to continue to develop the thoughts outlined there about the ‘leisure class’ that Veblen describes. Essentially, we might now see them as the aristocracy, or celebrities. They are…
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The 3rd Economy: Gift, Market and Plunder [1] | Christian Leadership and the Leisure Class
As some of you may know, I’ve been working on a novel for the past few months, playing with themes, among others, of the links between identity and consumption. One of the books I’ve picked up to feed the furnace has been Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 satire Conspicuous Consumption (an excerpt from his longer work The…