Every seventh year you shall grant a remission of debts.
— Deuteronomy 15:1
We live in a time of unprecedented debt. Worldwide and in the United States, personal, corporate, and government debt are at levels not seen in decades, or ever. We’re still living with the effects of the 2008-2009 financial crisis, triggered by the realization that trillions of dollars of debt owed to banks and investors just couldn’t be paid.
For all of the moral stigma placed on people in debt, especially when we’re unable to pay, there is little public discussion about what the Bible has to say on debt, wealth, poverty, and God. In particular the commandment that debts be cancelled regularly, and that land and wealth be redistributed (see Leviticus 25), is rarely taken seriously.
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Economist Michael Hudson has studied debt and finance from ancient times up through our own. On Thursday, December 8th, he’ll be joining us at Union Theological Seminary for a public lecture on the history of debt cancellation, in particular in the context of ancient Israel, and how this can help us understand and address today’s debt crisis. Dr. Hudson is the Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and the President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends. His latest book is Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy.
We’ll also have a panel of responses to Dr. Hudson’s lecture – learn more about them below.
Please let us know that you’re coming by RSVPing below.
When: Thursday, December 8th at 6pm
Where: Union Theological Seminary (3041 Broadway, New York, NY 10027), the Social Hall
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Respondents
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Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis is the Co-Director of the Kairos Center and a Founder and the Coordinator of the Poverty Initiative. She has spent the past two decades organizing amongst the poor in the United States. She is currently working on a book entitled, “Always With Us: What Jesus Really Said about the Poor.” She is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA).
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A highly respected scholar and public intellectual, the Rev. Dr. Serene Jones is the 16th and current President of the historic Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. The first woman to head the 174-year-old nondenominational seminary, which is in Manhattan and neighbors with Columbia University, Jones came to Union after seventeen years at Yale University, where she was the Titus Street Professor of Theology at the Divinity School, and chair of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She was co-principal investigator on the “Women, Religion, and Globalization Grant” for the Henry T. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs at Yale. Dr. Jones is a prolific and popular scholar in the fields of theology, religion, globalization, and gender studies. In addition to publishing five books, and 37 articles and book chapters since 1991, she has delivered a long list of professional papers and public lectures across the United States and around the world. She holds degrees from the University of Oklahoma, Yale Divinity School and Yale University. Jones is ordained in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the United Church of Christ.
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Claudia de la Cruz is a Bronx native whose parents immigrated from the Dominican Republic. She is a graduate from Theodore Roosevelt High School, and a graduate with a BA (2001) in forensic psychology from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and two Master’s degrees: one in social work from Columbia University and the other in divinity from Union Theological Seminary (both in 2007). She is a founding member of the Rebel Dias Arts Collective in the Bronx and a popular educator who has been organizing since her youth.
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Dr. Brigitte Kahl is a native of East Germany, an ordained minister and an innovative New Testament scholar whose work has been groundbreaking in Pauline studies. She brings a new perspective to Biblical scholarship by analyzing the dynamic relationship between the New Testament and the Roman Empire. In her pioneering book, Galatians Re-Imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (2010), Dr. Kahl re-defines the traditional paradigm of Pauline interpretation and radically recasts justification by faith as a theology of resistance and transformation.