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    [title] => The voice from within and the Focolare Movement
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Chiara Lubich, as recalled by the economist who worked with her

by Luigino Bruni

published in Osservatore Romano.va 03/07/2021

Whenever we want to talk about a woman who has had a prophetic role in the Church, the paradigm of reference is here in the Bible. We often encounter women in the Bible when we are facing profound crises, in such circumstances where they offer different perspectives, in the same way as the prophets. There is, in fact, a particular closeness between prophecy and feminine talent. First, both are concrete, and activate processes; second, they do not occupy space, and speak with their words and bodies; third, they possess an invincible instinct; and forth, they always choose life, which they believe in, and celebrate it to the last breath. Chiara Lubich’s story is one of these women’s stories, because she brought a spring of living water to an Italian society that was torn at that time between fascism and world wars, and a church that was still anchored to an ecclesiology and theology of the old regime.

[fulltext] =>

Chiara’s story is that of a woman, a laywoman, who followed an external voice that was also the most intimate and truest part of her. For a long time these two voices became the same voice, and Silvia Lubich (her secular name) and Chiara were the same person. Before 1943, these voices were distinct, and after 2004, in the last passages of her life, they became distinct again in her. This moment occurred when, under the shadow of a spiritual process in which her luminous life ended, some heard her say, “There is no more Chiara, there is only Silvia”. Every “charismatic”, every person who receives a charismatic gift for a spiritual foundation, lives in the continuous tension between a voice that is theirs and not theirs, words that are theirs and not theirs, a “name” that is theirs and not theirs - until the end. I knew Chiara personally and worked closely with her in the last ten years of her life, which were also the first ten years of my adult professional life as a teacher and economist. I saw her struggle to save the freedom of the first voice that had called her, to mark the difference between what she called the Ideal and the Focolare movement, to leave a generative gap between Law and Spirit, so that in that gap the spirit of the early days could continue to blow freely. Inevitably, her battle was only partially won, because these battles of the founders can never be won completely - every founder is a Jacob who, even if they come out victorious from the nocturnal and aquatic battle with the angel, they always bear the wound and continue to limp (Genesis 32). However, if the movement is still alive - and it is - and if, above all, our charism is still life-giving for young people and adults, this means that the angel’s wound was not fatal. Even with a limp, she and her movement have never stopped walking, experiencing the sequel so to speak. In the very last years of her life Chiara became more aware of the risk that the success of her movement might suffocate the purity and strength of the first voice that called her to Trent. This risk, which she perceived as both serious and impending, was perhaps the element that weighed most heavily on her that last night when she died 14 March 2008, at the age of 88.

Who was Chiara then?

Chiara was born in Trento, to a socialist father and a practicing Catholic mother. There, before and during the Second World War, she underwent formation in Catholic Action and in the Franciscan Third Order. Then, in 1943, she founded her Focolare Movement. In the early 1950s, she moved to Rome, then shortly afterwards to Rocca di Papa, where she continued to live and from where she led the focolarini, which in the meantime had literally spread throughout the world. The charism from which the whole movement around Chiara was generated is feminine, Marian charism, centered on evangelical unity and on that decisive moment in Christianity, which is Jesus’ cry of abandonment on the Cross. This last point, was so particularly dear to Clare it became the principal ideal of her life - “I have only one spouse on earth, Jesus forsaken”. In the summer of 1950, she led her movement to deal above all with spiritual pain, divisions and separations, to seek God where there is none. The social dimensions, particularly the political and economic ones, have always been of great importance. Therefore, it is not surprising, given the profound secularity of the movement, from which the Political Movement for Unity and the Economy of Communion (www.edc-online.org) were founded in the 1990s.

In the 20th century, Chiara was one of the Church’s most significant women. However, she was so in her own way. She was also a rebel in her own way, in a way that was so different and her own that it did not appear as such. For example, Clare and her movement - which in the early years was made up only of women, of girls - had always had a feminine and feminist trait, but Chiara’s “thirteenth-centuryness”, and therefore her radical catholicity, combined with her character that loved neither conflict nor controversy, produced a feminism sui generis. On the one hand, in fact, the focolarine, who were the type of woman who originated in the Movement, have always been characterised by a strong autonomy and independence from males, including priests. This autonomy -similar to and at times more accentuated than that of the female religious world-, was due also to Chiara’s undisputed leadership and ecclesiastical prestige (especially since the 1960s, with Paul VI’s pontificate). On the other hand, however, we find neither in Chiara’s writings nor in her actions any leading positions on the feminine question, and on the major burning issues of her time, for example, female priesthood, women and power in the Church, or family ethics. Clare and her movement have always expressed orthodox theses aligned with the official Magisterium of the Catholic Church. Thus, Clare’s genius was not expressed in proposing institutional innovations for women in the Church.

Where did it express itself then?

Certainly in mysticism. Chiara belonged to the great mystical tradition of modern Europe. Her experience should be read together with that of Claire of Assisi, whom she loved so much and from whom she took her name, passing through Teresa of Ávila, to arrive at more recent figures such as Edith Stein or Etty Illesum. She had an extraordinary gift of sensitivity for spirituality, a vocation that was both contemplative and active, a spirituality that she defined as “collective”, where Christianity showed itself and was experienced in community, reciprocity and communion. In the summer of 1949, in the Dolomites, she spent two months in a mystical experience (known as Paradiso ‘49), which decisively marked her life, the foundation and nature of her movement, and her spirituality.

Since she was a young girl, Clare felt a strong attraction to theology. Although she was not a theologian by trade nor had she undergone any specialised studies, she had a great theological intuition, which we could even go as far as to call a true theological genius. I worked with her for years in the Abbà School study centre and I could see how very impressive she was at her work in this respect. In particular, she excelled in penetrating the mystery of Christ’s passion and the Trinitarian vision of Christianity, in its cultural and existential implications.

In addition to an authentic genius for difficult and improbable dialogues with non-Christian churches and other religions, Chiara’s originality was also expressed on the level of thought and culture. In 1990, she felt an urgency to set up a study centre, and called upon the best theologians and scholars of her movement to join it, stating that a charism that does not become culture will not have a deep impact on the world and the Church. She had an immense esteem for culture and for men and women of thought - she had to give up university in 1939 because of the war, but this desire for culture never faded. From 1990 to 2004, for fifteen years Chiara spent every Saturday of the year, and a few weeks of her summer holidays, in founding and cultivating this body of thinkers from all disciplines, convinced that it was an essential step for the future maturation of her charism.

Finally, Clare’s prophecy was also expressed in the management of her movement. From the organisational point of view, what Chiara and her first companions - whom we should call disciples, to whom we should also add companions and disciples from 1950 - did was truly fantastic. Girls, not nuns, in a pre-conciliar church in Trentino that was all male, managed to give life to a movement that in a few years was found throughout the whole of Italy and then in the 1950s, on all continents. The method was that of Dante’s “mystical rose”, where each petal of the mother rose (Focolare of Trent) was detached and became a rose in turn with other petals, which were detached and so on. Each rose-petal had the same form and nature as the first rose. Therefore, the experience, spirituality and culture that had been experienced in Trento, went to live in Sicily, then in Brazil (thanks to Ginetta, one of her first companions), in Argentina (Lia), in the GDR (Natalia). These young women usually went alone, and despite remaining without physical contact with Italy for years, and with little contact by letter, they managed to replicate the exact same life they had experience in Trento. Chiara had extraordinary management qualities for this model that was neither hierarchical nor subsidiary, and perhaps best considered Trinitarian. An element of this success was Chiara’s talent for attracting many of the best young people of her time, who then became pillars and leaders of the movement.

Chiara did all this by using words above all - the words of the Gospel, her own words.

These words were impregnated with Christianity, and which enchanted, incited, and bound the whole life together. Lògos is the first enemy of tànatos . Like Sharazad, women ward off death, and thus prolong life, by giving us words and stories. Many women have done so, and do so. Chiara Lubich did it, and continues to do so.

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Chiara Lubich, as recalled by the economist who worked with her

by Luigino Bruni

published in Osservatore Romano.va 03/07/2021

Whenever we want to talk about a woman who has had a prophetic role in the Church, the paradigm of reference is here in the Bible. We often encounter women in the Bible when we are facing profound crises, in such circumstances where they offer different perspectives, in the same way as the prophets. There is, in fact, a particular closeness between prophecy and feminine talent. First, both are concrete, and activate processes; second, they do not occupy space, and speak with their words and bodies; third, they possess an invincible instinct; and forth, they always choose life, which they believe in, and celebrate it to the last breath. Chiara Lubich’s story is one of these women’s stories, because she brought a spring of living water to an Italian society that was torn at that time between fascism and world wars, and a church that was still anchored to an ecclesiology and theology of the old regime.

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The voice from within and the Focolare Movement

The voice from within and the Focolare Movement

Chiara Lubich, as recalled by the economist who worked with her by Luigino Bruni published in Osservatore Romano.va 03/07/2021 Whenever we want to talk about a woman who has had a prophetic role in the Church, the paradigm of reference is here in the Bible. We often encounter women in the Bible when...
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    [title] => Meritocracy and its limits: from theological category to economic dogma
    [alias] => meritocracy-and-its-limits-from-theological-category-to-economic-dogma
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At a certain point in Western civilization a new and unpredictable idea appeared: a meritocratic society was finally possible and it took the shape of the business community

By Luigino Bruni

Published in Corriere Buone Notizie 19/12/2019

Meritocracy today is the ethical legitimization of inequality. In the 20th century, in Europe, we fought inequality as something evil; in the 21st century, it was enough to change its name (meritocracy) to transform inequality from vice to public virtue. A most bizarre fate, if you think about the fact that meritocracy was and still is presented as a means of fighting inequality – made all the more bizarre if you consider that this is the very reason that fanatics of meritocracy are actually people who in good faith really wish to pave the way for a better and fairer society.

[fulltext] =>

The words spoken by German philosopher Walter Benjamin a hundred years ago are true for meritocracy as well: «During the Age of the Reformation Christianity turned into capitalism». Before meritocracy, before becoming an economic dogma, it was mostly a religious and theological category. «To earn or obtain merits», «to earn paradise» and other similar expressions speak of themes that have been at the centre of Christian piety for centuries, and continue to accompany the life of Catholics today. A similar idea of the nature of ​​merits was already present in the Bible, but it was the encounter with Greek and Roman ethics that transformed part of Christianity into an ethics of merit and virtues, to the point that in order to be declared a saint a Christian had to prove that he or she had practiced a number of heroic virtues. Biblical and evangelical ethics were different, excellence was not to be found in virtues but in agape, which does not form part of stoic or Aristotelian virtues. For some years now meritocracy has emerged from the debates in the classrooms of the faculties of theology, forgetting the doctrinal disputes of Paul, Augustine, Pelagius and Luther along the way, and entering the most elegant and modern classrooms of business schools around the world, where these issues are addressed without any theological competence.

Meritocracy has ancient and deep roots. A deep vein of human civilization has always thought that somewhere somehow there must be some sort of order, that would reward each and everyone one of us on the basis of the merits we had acquired while punishing us for the faults committed and accumulated. In general this order was conceived as supernatural and postponed to a future life, since it was too evident that on earth such an order did not exist and never existed. At a certain point in the evolution of Western civilization, however, a completely new and unpredictable idea appeared, according to which a meritocratic society was finally possible here and now. Simply because such a community already existed, the business community, of which large companies and banks were the most mature expression. Here, merits were perfectly quantifiable, measurable, sortable on a scale, so that each person got his or her due, no more no less. His or her due in terms of merits and, of course, but also in terms of faults and demerits. An act of promise that has since convinced many, because it presented itself and continues to present itself as a superior form of justice (compared to the ordinary and common one). And so within a few years meritocracy has now migrated from the business community to the entire civil society, from politics to school, from left to right, from the health sector to the non-profit sector, and has also begun to undermine ecclesial communities. A great ideological operation, among the largest of our time, which is based on ethical and anthropological deception, as evident as it remains unspoken: that our merits and demerits should stay evident, easy to see in order to classify them, measure, and then reward.

Another, arbitrary, hypothesis is then to believe that the market is capable of correctly rewarding our merits, thus keeping a fundamental virtue of the market and an essential trait of a good entrepreneur, quiet, that knowing how to live with outcomes and success not directly associated to one's own or others’ merits and faults is essential. A serious defect in the market is in fact to demand that one's results should only be tied to one's own merits and not to what others, with whom we interact, are willing to recognize and give to us. But there is more. We know that our most precious merits are discovered by facing an illness, a mourning, a separation. Precious few of these real merits pass through the economic sphere, as companies are not really interested in our deepest and truest merits. They do not want our humility or our gentleness, they want us «winning» and invulnerable; they do not want our mercy or our compassion, virtues and beatitudes which they do not understand, or if they do they fear them. Not that they would ever tell us, but companies want very little from us, because deep down they perceive that if they asked for a lot we would give them too much, we would in fact become so free that we would no longer be manageable or directed by company objectives. Finally, meritocracy is also an ideological mechanism that frees us from any responsibility towards the poor. A necessary consequence of meritocracy is in fact the interpretation of poverty as guilt. Because if talent is primarily a merit (the great axiom of meritocracy), the lack of talent becomes a demerit, and therefore poverty a source of guilt and blame. The last residue of European welfare will be wiped out when we finally let ourselves be convinced that the poor are guilty of their own poverty. We will leave them to be blamed for their misfortune, and we will sleep peacefully on our own merits and irresponsibility.

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At a certain point in Western civilization a new and unpredictable idea appeared: a meritocratic society was finally possible and it took the shape of the business community

By Luigino Bruni

Published in Corriere Buone Notizie 19/12/2019

Meritocracy today is the ethical legitimization of inequality. In the 20th century, in Europe, we fought inequality as something evil; in the 21st century, it was enough to change its name (meritocracy) to transform inequality from vice to public virtue. A most bizarre fate, if you think about the fact that meritocracy was and still is presented as a means of fighting inequality – made all the more bizarre if you consider that this is the very reason that fanatics of meritocracy are actually people who in good faith really wish to pave the way for a better and fairer society.

[jcfields] => Array ( ) [type] => intro [oddeven] => item-even )

Meritocracy and its limits: from theological category to economic dogma

At a certain point in Western civilization a new and unpredictable idea appeared: a meritocratic society was finally possible and it took the shape of the business community By Luigino Bruni Published in Corriere Buone Notizie 19/12/2019 Meritocracy today is the ethical legitimization of inequali...
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    [title] => The consumer and his choices: the real factor required for a new economic model
    [alias] => the-consumer-and-his-choices-the-real-factor-required-for-a-new-economic-model
    [introtext] => 

After the "heart attack" of a decade ago, capitalism did not undergo an adequate "treatment". The long-awaited reforms could be imposed by the citizens and consumers

By Luigino Bruni

Published in Valori 23/10/2019 within the context of the Dossier "La bolla del capitalismo etico" (The bubble of ethical capitalism)

Declarations on ethics and values by large multinational corporations must always be taken cum grano salis, i.e. with a pinch of salt because, if on one hand they have to say things that are not too far from the truth (if only for their reputation, especially today in this era of social media), on the other hand it's part of the market game to promise more than you could ever keep in practice. However, one thing is certain by now: the way in which we have understood companies and the market over the last hundred years is experiencing a crisis that is much more radical and profound than the financial crisis of the past few years.

[fulltext] =>

Crisis 2007, a heart attack that capitalism soon forgot all about

The financial crisis which began in 2007 was a sort of heart attack to the system but, once angioplasty was performed and a stent put in place, with the help of a few drugs, "capitalism the patient" continued the same lifestyle as before; for a few months fear made it go on a diet for bit and quit smoking but then, little by little, the old habits all came back as if nothing had happened. This time, however, the matter is of a very different nature: the environmental crisis of a magnitude that has no precedent in human history, does not only represent a coronary crisis but a radical change in life conditions that require an urgent adaptation to something completely new.

The learnings from Fridays for Future

Experts knew and have known all of this for some time now, but thanks to the "Fridays for Future" movement and also to the thoughts and actions of Pope Francis (see Laudato sii and the movement that it led to), in recent times the general awareness that our toy is now broken is becoming vast, popular and universal.

Companies need to change their business culture, not due to altruism, nor for the sake or love of the common good, but simply if they do not wish to go out of business. The only true ruler of capitalism is the consumer and his preferences. This is a dogma of capitalist religion, but it is also its great weakness because, all things considered, if consumers should change their buying preferences together, en masse, companies could do nothing but quickly change the products they offer.

From plastic to new products and lifestyles

We are already seeing it with plastic: only a few months ago we could still hold conferences - perhaps on ethics and economics - with plastic bottles on the table in plain view. Today it is no longer possible (I speak from personal experience) because that bottle in plain view would undermine any speech regarding ethics being delivered from that same table or chair.

All this happened in just a few months (the first global Fridays for Future was held on March 15th of this year). In a few months this wave of epochal change will expand and include many other products: from cars to air travel.

All this is being perfectly understood by companies because, as Jevons recalled in the late nineteenth century, any real entrepreneur is a forerunner of market trends.

But there is more: I could be wrong but it is highly probable that what is happening on the environmental front is progressively and rapidly also moving towards the social front and companies with a non-participatory kind of management and proprietary structures concentrated to a few very rich shareholders, will end up being punished by consumers, by young people in particular, because what happened with democracy, where political power for centuries was concentrated in a few hands and on a few heads (male, rich and noble) but progressively began expanding until it reached universal suffrage, will eventually extend to the economy as well.

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After the "heart attack" of a decade ago, capitalism did not undergo an adequate "treatment". The long-awaited reforms could be imposed by the citizens and consumers

By Luigino Bruni

Published in Valori 23/10/2019 within the context of the Dossier "La bolla del capitalismo etico" (The bubble of ethical capitalism)

Declarations on ethics and values by large multinational corporations must always be taken cum grano salis, i.e. with a pinch of salt because, if on one hand they have to say things that are not too far from the truth (if only for their reputation, especially today in this era of social media), on the other hand it's part of the market game to promise more than you could ever keep in practice. However, one thing is certain by now: the way in which we have understood companies and the market over the last hundred years is experiencing a crisis that is much more radical and profound than the financial crisis of the past few years.

[jcfields] => Array ( ) [type] => intro [oddeven] => item-odd )

The consumer and his choices: the real factor required for a new economic model

After the "heart attack" of a decade ago, capitalism did not undergo an adequate "treatment". The long-awaited reforms could be imposed by the citizens and consumers By Luigino Bruni Published in Valori 23/10/2019 within the context of the Dossier "La bolla del capitalismo etico" (The bubble of et...
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    [title] => The Vocation and the Other
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    [introtext] => 

What does it mean to have a mission in life? May we call them “civil vocations”? We addressed this question to the italian economist Luigino Bruni, who for some time has been dealing with this issue in his articles for the Italian newspaper Avvenire.

by  Paolo Balduzzi

published in unitedworldproject.org on 15/02/2019

Prof. Bruni, Let’s begin by clarifying the concept of “civil vocation”…

I would not have added “civil” because every vocation is civil. Even the vocation of a cloistered nun is civil, because it has to do with human life. A cloistered nun can live a secluded life, but it is always a vocation that looks at humanity. A man or woman religious prays for everyone.

[fulltext] =>

What is a vocation?

I will answer starting from the empirical fact that vocations exist throughout the world. In all areas of life, there are people who feel an inner call to perform a task. The strongest areas are artistic and religious life, some feel called to the scientific career. At some point and in a certain place, there is an inner call to one’s consciousness, something that calls on you and asks you to do something. You feel that your life has something to do with a task. This is a vocation. Someone calls this “voice,” God; others just feel it, but it is a concrete, historical, and empirical fact that these types of people exist and they make the world more beautiful! The world is more beautiful because there are vocations, because there are people who live life as a task, a commitment, a destiny.

Is there a characteristic that distinguishes a vocation?

I think it is the fact that this task, this destiny, does not have much to do with the things we do but with “who I am“. Therefore, it has to do with identity; it is about my place in the world. That does not mean that it is the only dimension of a person. Each person has more than one identity, many elements: he/she is a mother, a father, for many years he/she is a worker, but there is a particularly strong dimension of life, that makes you say, “I am a painter,” and not just, “my work is painting”.

Sometimes, though, perhaps out of fear, you can hear that voice and turn to the other side…

Like true alliances, like marriages, vocation has to do with blood, with the flesh. You can leave an alliance, you can break a pact but the flesh remains marked forever, because it is a flesh issue, it is not an issue of ideas.

You hear the voice in one condition, then maybe things change during your lifetime … what does it mean to be faithful to a vocation?

This voice is not immutable, it is an alliance, so it grows with me. I would like to change the covenant that you read during the marriage, which in Italian goes, “I promise to take you as my bride/groom, to always be faithful to you, in joy and in sorrow”. I would say instead, “I will take you as my bride/groom and I promise to always be faithful to you, to what you are now and to what you will become, and that neither you nor I know”. Because the problem of vocations, of pacts, is that you both change, the “voice” changes and you change too. Therefore, “I promise to be faithful to what you are now and to what you will become and that we do not know, neither you nor me“. Instead, when someone ends a relationship, often says, “You have changed!” On the contrary, the human being is not a mummy that remains intact throughout life.

Therefore, the vocation has to do with oneself; is it not just a religious issue?

Absolutely, even if in a book as big as the Bible, vocation is the word being used, and what forms vocations can take … I’ll tell you about some vocations that seem very interesting to me, then, each of you can identify him/herself to one more than another, but they are all very beautiful. The first we find, not in historical order, but because it is very famous, is Abraham’s vocation.

Abraham is an already grown man who, at a certain point, hears a voice calling him by name and invites him to leave, promising him a “new land”, where milk and honey flow, which, at that time, was the maximum abundance. It is like saying today, “I’ll give you caviar”. In that world, children were Paradise, because in the Old Testament there is no idea of ​​Paradise, the only Paradise were the children, that is, the idea that you continue after death. What is given to Abraham is a promise of happiness: you experience an encounter with a calling and there you see your happiness: “Go, leave, do this work, follow (for example) your artistic vocation and you will be happy.” Therefore, a promise of happiness that is structurally very common to many vocations, especially among young people, because young people want to be happy.

Well, if I may, even the more ‘mature’ persons want to be happy…

Obviously! Furthermore, I can tell you that so many vocations occur while people are at work! There is nothing more beautiful than this. Work is a place where God speaks to you, and here we have a second form. While Moses, for example, is working – he is a shepherd -, a burning bush calls him, “Go and free my slaved people who are in Egypt”. There is no promised land, no happiness, there is only a task of freeing slaves, so that Moses says, “I’m not going there, send my brother Aaron, I am not a good speaker.” There is not much happiness, there is rather the vocation as a task: you have to do this, because life is like that, you feel it inside and you have to do it.

Are there any examples that help us to understand more precisely how a vocation materializes?

There is the scheme of the vocation of Samuel, which I really like. Samuel is a very interesting figure, because he is a boy already destined to the temple, since he was a child, and he lives in the temple, he grows up, but he does not yet know the Lord. Until the Lord himself calls him, one night. But the old priest, Eli, does not understand and sends him back to bed three times. Only on the third call does he understand that God is calling Samuel. What does it mean? There are people who do not understand right away, we need to call them several times, and this is where Eli turns in.

Eli is the name of this senior priest, an expert on the word, an expert on spiritual life, who says, “Be careful, it is the Lord!” But Eli too decided to wait three times. What I mean is that it takes patience in these things. Sometimes vocations are lost because you do not wait and you say immediately, “Look, yes, the Lord is calling you”, or because there is no “Eli” that teaches us how to do it.

As for the “materialization”, as you call it, I tell you this: just think of the fact, and it is amazing, that when Samuel grows up, he consecrates Saul, the first king, on the outskirts of the city, not in the temple. I like very much that a fundamental act of biblical history happens in a suburb, in the suburbs of a city, not in the temple. Just as God meets Moses while his sheep are grazing, and God meets the Apostles while they are fishing.

I really like this: the secular nature of life! That is, the most important things happen while you are at work, while you are washing dishes, while you are driving your car… This is the secular nature of vocations, they happen just where you live, where you are. From the history of the Gospels, it seems that the Archangel Gabriel himself reaches Mary in her house, not in the temple, and I am sure that she was washing the dishes or cleaning the room.

Yet today it is difficult to hear that voice in the midst of a hubbub of voices that tell you very different things, take you on other roads, but also in the midst of a thousand duties and tasks…

Look, I am a big fan of Noah, because Noah is a righteous man in a broken world after Cain, a world where people were killing a boy for a scratch, where they had come to a war of everyone against everyone.

The Bible says that there was only one right man: it was Noah. You can save an entire city if there is one left, you can save a business if there is one, a family, if there is one of them. It is not that we need 50, but it takes someone who is a good listener and responds to a vocation: this is what a “right” man means. Then, this “one” also finds companions, but basically Francis was “one”, Clare was “one.” It begins with one calling you: “Francis!”, “Clare!”, “Noah!”.
“One” and “right” who answers a calling without speaking, because Noah in the Bible does not speak with God, he speaks by building the ark. God tells him, “build an ark!” and he does it. There are some people, some who become Noah, making the ark, who hear a call to build an ark. They do not know who the voice is but they feel an inner drive, they build the ark and then, maybe after so many years, they find out what the voice was. The ark is an image: it is a family, a commitment in politics, in the music conservatory, or in a given profession. What is important is that this “ark moment” arrives, sooner or later. So many vocations begin like Abraham’s: “Go, I will make you happy” and they end up like Noah’s. That is, you begin for your own happiness and you end for the happiness of others. You go somewhere to find your own happiness and one day you realize that what really matters is not your happiness but saving others.

Maybe one spends his/her whole life searching for a vocation … but never discovers it…

This type of vocation has no age. It can even come just before death. You discover that you are a poet at the age of 80, you did not know it and you write a poem, but that poem has been prepared for 80 years. This is fundamental, vocations flourish, life works when ‘the ark arrives’ and you forget about yourself and save someone: it can be an ark, it can be a yacht, it can be a cruiser, it can be a canoe, but not a single-seater! It cannot be a k1, at least a k2. You need someone with you, that is, you have to save someone. This, in my opinion, is a beautiful way of imagining life, that is, a life that begins by thinking of oneself and it ends up by thinking of others. You eventually understand that you are making choices that are more authentic than the choices that are only geared toward your personal happiness. Everyone’s happiness is the most important thing. These are all vocations, irrespective to how they are expressed (a religious language, a secular language, an artistic language…). It takes “one” who feels called, who answers, who seeks happiness and then, one day, he/she understands that happiness means building an ark to save others, to save someone.

What, then, are the “places” of vocations?

If we wanted to understand where we are to find these vocations in the world today, we should look for them especially in the existential suburbs, on the boats of immigrants in Lampedusa, in the areas of those who fight for human rights, for the environment, for refugees, for prisoners, for the poor…

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May we call them “civil vocations”? We addressed this question to the italian economist Luigino Bruni, who for some time has been dealing with this issue in his articles for the Italian newspaper Avvenire. 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What does it mean to have a mission in life? May we call them “civil vocations”? We addressed this question to the italian economist Luigino Bruni, who for some time has been dealing with this issue in his articles for the Italian newspaper Avvenire.

by  Paolo Balduzzi

published in unitedworldproject.org on 15/02/2019

Prof. Bruni, Let’s begin by clarifying the concept of “civil vocation”…

I would not have added “civil” because every vocation is civil. Even the vocation of a cloistered nun is civil, because it has to do with human life. A cloistered nun can live a secluded life, but it is always a vocation that looks at humanity. A man or woman religious prays for everyone.

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The Vocation and the Other

The Vocation and the Other

What does it mean to have a mission in life? May we call them “civil vocations”? We addressed this question to the italian economist Luigino Bruni, who for some time has been dealing with this issue in his articles for the Italian newspaper Avvenire. by  Paolo Balduzzi published in unitedworldp...
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Interview with John Milbank, Anglican Theologian of the University of Nottingham

by Luigino Bruni

John Milbank ridMy first question is, do you think that the present capitalism, the 21st century capitalism, which is quite different from the 20th or 19th century capitalism, presents some religious dimension? When you look at what is going on in today's society, there are some religious foundations or religious roots what we see in very secular terms, because capitalism is strangely presenting itself as a sort of rationality, civilisation, post-ideological theory, but if you look really carefully, you find a lot of irrational, or, at least, religious “stuff”. What do you think about the religious dimension and nature of our capitalism?

That's a very interesting question. I suppose that the capitalism we have today is ever more extreme, in the sense that it is dominated more and more by finance and by debt even though it can be argued that those structures were endemic to capitalism at the outset - it's just that they are becoming ever more prevalent.

[fulltext] =>

In addition to that, we've got a further extension of commodification, so that I think today, also, knowledge, information is being turned into a commodity. or, rather, knowledge is being commodified, one could say, in the form of information. Thus the rise of the information economy, the shareability and reproduction, which was always incredibly important to capitalist technology, has exponentially increased, as well, so that you can now reproduce things very cheaply and, in effect, give things away. So it's not even just the matter of the buying and selling of information - in some ways, information appears free. But the monopolisers of distribution of information, like Google and Amazon, use that to make profits and to trade at a completely different and awfully visible level. I think these same tendencies tend to encourage a further merging of market powers with state powers, of owners with rulers, so to build up ever further a very remote, very rich international oligarchy. So those would be, roughly, the features which are at once new and yet, maybe, exaggerations of things that have always been there.

And so you're asking me about the question of religion and capitalism today, and I'm not so sure I can completely understand it, or what the answer would be to that but, broadly speaking, there seem to be quite good arguments for saying that, to begin with, capitalism was encouraged by certain religious factors, both Protestant and Catholic. In particulal, theologies that took a very gloomy view about human nature, tended to encourage the idea that an economy can be run on amoral principles, and even that an economy run on amoral principles is the way in which God keeps order within a sinful world and in general, then, a kind of despair of natural goodness, and seeing the exercise of natural goodness as more and more irrelevant to human salvation - I think that lies in the background. Of course then, eventually, if you encourage an amoral process, and if you encourage the idea that nature and our life in this world is not very relevant in religious terms, that encourages secularisation, to put it quite simply. People forget about the God pits, and society, economy and politics become independent and inherit, to some degree, this sense of an amoral self-regulation.

So the interesting question, I think, is, does that mean that religion is simply left behind? Today, there is some evidence that that's not the case, that we have things like the success gospel within various sects; in developing countries, we see people converting to forms of Protestant Christianity, as if there is a need to recapitulate western history in some sense. But even then, is it only that? In the case of the United States, the most advanced capitalist country, Protestant Christianity is still very much alive, and there are many Protestants (and some Catholics) giving a theological apologia for capitalism. I think that raises a quite interesting question of whether, if there is a link between Protestantism and capitalism, or, shall we say, more broadly, between a certain kind of theology, is that always likely, sometimes, to return and is that returning today because we've advanced towards an even more extreme phase of capitalism? Does that mean that there's something quite insecure about purely secular legitimations of the capitalist economy?

What do you think are the most relevant issues in the domain of the economic life and religion today? Or, more precisely economics and theology. What issues do you think are crucial for the quality of our democracy today apart from the emphasized Islamic issues?

Well, I think that the issue I've already mentioned is whether there can be an adequate secular legitimization of capitalism. I think it's significant that people still see this as a providential process or at least give quasi-theological accounts of why capitalism is realistic. It deals with human nature so people want to link it to an account of human liberty and they want to see human liberty as sacred. So, especially in America, they want to give an account of capitalism that sees human liberty as something sacred and I think that raises the issue of whether rationales for capitalism remain somehow latently theological or can become specifically theological and whether, therefore, they can only be challenged by alternative theologies that have a less grim account of human nature, or through an understanding of human freedom in a slightly different way as being freedom for rather than freedom from. Freedom to discover the truth. Freedom to develop for yourself what is an objectively good way of human life.

I also think, that much more deeply than that, though, lies the question of whether capitalism is inherently linked to disenchantment of the world and to desecularization. Yeah, so that, I mean the irony may be that this disenchantment of the world is encouraged by a certain theology that ones see as simply the instrument of God. That the world is simply the way it is because God has arbitrarily made it the way it is and runs it according to certain mechanical procedures and that the world in itself doesn't have any symbolic significance and therefore if you've completely disenchanted reality, you can reduce everything to a commodity. nothing is sacred, therefore everything can be enclosed, altered, bought, and sold. You can do what you like with anything, the only restrictions on that, the only way of altering that anarchy tends to be then the order of the markets. But then once disenchantment has become wholly secular and the theology that lies behind it is forgetten, then almost inevitably in things like ecological and new age movements people discover what the world is in itself a source of enchantment. There are things to which they wish to give a sacred attachment. There are things that are valuable quite beyond the market price or in the the way they happen to reach private needs. People start to discover for themselves the inherence sacrality effect and then you get a sort of paganism.

I was about to say that that was actually what was going on before the Jewish experience. Then nature was considered to be sacred. Our bible, God, is different than the natural

You run the risk of losing the gain made by the Bible, the unique sacredness of the human person and you get various ideologies that want to subordinate the human to the Earth just like another kind of animal and you get a revival of a pagan secularity. So I think in some ways the challenge is to recover what I would call in the broader sense the "Catholic Balance" where the world is not in itself ultimately sacred but it is sacramental and there is also a hierarchy within nature such that we should value all life, but human life supremely but at the same time if we don't value life other than human life, we won't have a fully human existance and we will end up devaluating human life as well in the end.

Let me ask you -- what are the differences between what you called the sacrament vision of the world and the market -- a huge importance has been given to things, to commodities, as a new form of sacrament but where do the differences lie?

In a way a part of capitalism is a spectacle. It doesn't just commodify things. It also turns things into spectacles and these are quasi-iconic realities. Instead of being surrounded by statues of saints and heros all the time, we're surrounded by shoes, bags, cars, images of goods or images of fashionable people and so on. These images don't really present anything above us, but nor do they represent something to which we could aspire. In fact, they confront us with defeat at every turn because in order to make us want more they always present us with the unattainable and it's not really any desirable goal or anything that is going to improve the real quality of our human lives, so they're not signs of hope in the way that the statue of the hero or the saint is.

But once one's understood all that-- the way capitalism calculates and desacralizes, the way it also produces things that are quasi-sacred-- I think at that point, this is where religious people meet to confront people of the secular left more and say: "Look. How can you have a purely secular critique over the capitalist order?" If everything is only material, if everything is disenchanted, then capitalism will always remain the most advanced form of emancipated modernity. That's the problem. Yeah?

We know from Max Weber but also from Fanfani that there is no capitalism without spirit. You think that today, it is possible to have a form of capitalism without any form of spirit?

Perhaps what I would say is that the procedures of capitalism and the spirit of capitalism are very much the same thing, but this is why Marx talked about fetishisation, for example, but it's not just an economy, it is in itself, a quasi-religion. It's not just a question of exploiting people's labour, but inherently of exploiting people's desire, the dimension Marx didn't make enough of. That profit proceeds not just from not paying people fair shares, but also from overpricing or making people endlessly want surplus goods. So the manipulation of desire and the appeal to both accumulation and fascination is the quasi-religious element. So I think capitalism, in that sense, remains a religion of a matter of spirit as basically any new factor is such as the rise of automation, but automation is something that we as human subjects are encouraged to be fascinated by but increasingly the rationale is defined by what can be automated.

Interesting. My last question is-- as one of the most important theologists of our generation, which kind of changes you would recommend to the business community to achieve common goals today? If you were to address your words to economies, to businessmen, which kind of changes would you call for as a theologist?

Well, I think that-- but I wouldn't begin by assuming that businessmen don't ask themselves these questions. I think they do sometimes in all sorts of ways, and I think I would ask that they rethink the purpose of the firm or the corporation, which to some degree, they're beginning to do and I would encourage them to think of the modern firm as having such an enormous degree of social influence, it needs to think of itself as not just an economic organisation, but it needs to think of itself as pursuing social value, social purpose, even political purpose, as something that integrally belongs with its economic purposes and that the separation of these things is essentially something very artificial. We need to recover their integration so that if you could say that the economic, in a sense, has purely economic purposes of too much influence, the only way to correct that is not in the end through the states, which often lately has bureaucratic purposes. But, in fact, often through corporate economic bodies themselves, really thinking what they're all about. But they need to think of themselves as not just making money, but as producing certain goods and services that are inherently valid and that if they pursue more genuine purposes, in the end, that can also give you a market advantage because I think in the very long term, people will choose these more substantiative things. But you have to regard that, I think, in terms of a very long game, and often, that means that firms may need to group together more collaboratively. They may need to operate within a shared horizon and within a shared code of practice, especially if they are to protect themselves from a bigger undercut by much more short-term operators who may only win in the short term. But by the time they rise, its become too late. So I think that the market can favour more virtuous practice, but only if you're prepared to operate in a certain manner and this also does require a new legal framework that deliberately favours that more virtuous mode of operations. I mean, I suppose you could say, "well, I'm taking over for a more radical version of a social market."

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Interview with John Milbank, Anglican Theologian of the University of Nottingham

by Luigino Bruni

John Milbank ridMy first question is, do you think that the present capitalism, the 21st century capitalism, which is quite different from the 20th or 19th century capitalism, presents some religious dimension? When you look at what is going on in today's society, there are some religious foundations or religious roots what we see in very secular terms, because capitalism is strangely presenting itself as a sort of rationality, civilisation, post-ideological theory, but if you look really carefully, you find a lot of irrational, or, at least, religious “stuff”. What do you think about the religious dimension and nature of our capitalism?

That's a very interesting question. I suppose that the capitalism we have today is ever more extreme, in the sense that it is dominated more and more by finance and by debt even though it can be argued that those structures were endemic to capitalism at the outset - it's just that they are becoming ever more prevalent.

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The almost sacredness of capitalism

Interview with John Milbank, Anglican Theologian of the University of Nottingham by Luigino Bruni My first question is, do you think that the present capitalism, the 21st century capitalism, which is quite different from the 20th or 19th century capitalism, presents some religious dimension? When yo...
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An opportunity for reflection and action on the many forms of modern day slavery

by Luigino Bruni

Logo Anno Santo Misericordia ridAccording to biblical humanism every jubilee year is an anniversary of mercy, but it is above all social, economic-political mercy: it was a crucial element in the jubilee year of the Jews to free those slaves who had become debt slaves. If we want this jubilee year not to remain a private and intimate matter of individual Christians, we must seize this great opportunity that Pope Francis gives us to bring about major initiatives of forgiveness and mercy in the economic, banking and civil world. One possible way of doing this would be to question ourselves about finance and about the many debts and slaves of our times who have been enslaved by a bad system.

[fulltext] =>

The real question that I pose as an economist of communion at the beginning of this jubilee year is: "Can we make sure that this great event will also become an economic, civil, political event that can change our economic and financial relations, one that may reform a financial system that produces slaves?" Have a wonderful Holy Year!

At the beginning of this Holy Year we are republishing the article written by Luigino Bruni for Avvenire on 16 November 2014, commenting on the establishment of the jubilee year in Exodus. Best wishes for a Happy Holy Year to all: may this be a year of economic and civil mercy, too!

The Treasure of the Seventh Day

published in Avvenire on 16/11/2014

Logo Levatrici d EgittoIn Montgomery, Alabama, in a small Baptist church, I heard the most extraordinary sermon ever: the topic was the book of Exodus and the political struggle of the black in the South. From his pulpit the preacher mimed the exodus from Egypt, and he expounded the similarities with the present; he bent his back under the whip, he defied Pharaoh, he fearfully hesitated in front of the sea, he accepted the covenant and the law at the foot of the mountain.

M. Walzer, Exodus and Revolution

The types of humanism that have shown themselves capable of a future have flourished thanks to non-predatory relationships with time and with the earth. Time and the earth are not our creation; they can only be received, kept, cared for and managed by us, as a gift and a promise. And when we don't act like this and use time and land for profit, the future horizon of all gets cloudy and smaller.

Biblical humanism had translated this dimension of the radical gift nature of time and land with the great law of the Sabbath and the Jubilee, with the culture of the fallow land: For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield, but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the beasts of the field may eat.  ...Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest; that your ox and your donkey may have rest, and the son of your servant woman, and the alien, may be refreshed. (Ex 23:10-12)

We are not the masters of the world. We live on it, it loves us, nourishes us and gives us life, but we are guests and pilgrims here, residents and owners of a land that is entirely ours, and entirely foreign to us, where we feel at home and as travellers at the same time. The earth has always been a promised land, a goal that is in front of us and is never reached. And it is also the land on which we built our house, where our neighbourhood is, where the crops grow in our field.

At the roots of the biblical culture of the fallow there is only a wise and sustainable technique of the cultivation of the land. In the Book of Exodus we find the fallow along with the Sabbath and the jubilee year, and it is an expression of a deeper and more general law concerning nature, time, animals, social relations; it is a radical prophecy of human and cosmic brotherhood. You can use the land for six days, not seven; you can get help from the work of other men for six days, not seven. You can and you have to work, but not always, because we only worked always when we were slaves in Egypt. The domestic animals work six days for you, but the seventh is not for you. The stranger is not a stranger every day, on the seventh day he is a person of your house with and like all the others. There's a part of your land and your “stuff” that is not yours, and you have to leave it to the wild animals, to the stranger, to the poor. What you have is not altogether and only for you. It also belongs to another one who is never too “other” to be left out from the horizon of “us all”. All true goods are common goods.

But if  there is a stigma of gratuitousness imprinted on things and on human relationships, then every property is imperfect, every dominion is secondary, no foreigner is really and only a foreigner, no poor is poor forever. Prophetically, Christianity has sent the ‘letter’ of the law of the Sabbath into crisis, but not to reduce the seventh day to the level of the other six. In the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ where the poor are called happy and the servants friends, the first six days are called to convert into the prophecy of gratuitousness and universal brotherhood enclosed in the last day.

Therefore the law of the seventh day tells us that the animals, the earth, nature are not only valuable in relation to us humans, they are also valuable in themselves. Land and lakes must be respected, and so left to rest free from our dominion and our acquisitive instinct, not only because their fruits shall be more healthy and good for us this way; they should be respected for their intrinsic value and dignity that we should recognize and never offend even when a land is not cultivated, or when there is no fish to catch in a lake. Because fields, lakes and forests are created and given as gifts, just as we humans, animals and the world is. It's the fraternity of the earth that inspired the law of the fallow, the Sabbath, the Jubilee.

The radical diversity of the seventh day reminds us that the laws of the six days, the asymmetries and inequalities are neither the only nor the most true ones, because the seventh day is the judgment over the justice and humanity of the other six. The degree of humanity and civilization of any concrete society is measured using the difference between the sixth and seventh day. The last day then becomes the perspective from which the other six days, as well as their ethical, spiritual and human quality can be viewed and judged. When there is no seventh day, work becomes slavery to those who work; it becomes servitude and lack of breath for the land and the animals; the stranger never becomes a brother and the poor remain short of redemption of themselves and the city. Empires have always tried to eliminate the very idea of the seventh day and the concrete utopia contained in it, thinking of eliminating the judgment on the injustices perpetrated by them throughout the six days – it's nice to think that while the Jewish priests wrote the Book of Exodus, or at least some pieces of it, they were slaves in Babylon, with no Shabbats. For this reason, they loved it and longed for it as a great hope and promise of freedom from all idols and empires, and as a judgment on their time: the prophecy of a different ‘day’ has always reappeared in the midst of suffering and slavery, and it can be born yet again in our time.
As long as we save the prophecy of the seventh day there might be hope for the poor and the oppressed and all those who are not happy with the slavery and humiliation of the six days of history. And let's say that we do not want those injustices to last forever.

The law of the seventh day challenges every aspect of life. As individuals it invites us not to consume and possess ourselves fully, to make room in our soul that is not occupied by our projects so that some seeds that we don't even know how to receive can shoot up and flourish in there. Without this dimension of gratuitousness and respect for the mystery that we are, life is missing that space of freedom and generosity which is the dwelling place of the spiritual humus that matures the “already” from the “not-yet”. It's the intimate and precious space for the most fruitful kind of generativity. It is there, in the land of the free that is not only a “source of income” for us, where the big surprises of life reach us that will change it forever, it is there that true creativity is born. It is from that piece of uncultivated and untapped land of the garden that we can see the top line of the horizon between heaven and earth, where our eyes so sickly fixed on the infinite may finally relax and find rest.

But the logic of the fallow (the Italian word for fallow is “maggese”, originating from the word “maggio” or May, the month in which fields were left to rest in the Roman world) has important messages also for communities and institutions. A community without fallow land has no time for feasts, is not a welcoming community, takes possession of people and goods, does not know fraternity, so the breath of the ‘breathing’ of the spirit cannot be felt in it.  However, wherever its indicators are clear and strong: the hierarchies and power only last six days there the gratuitousness of the feast and the efficiency of work have the same dignity. The children and the poor always feel at home, because there are areas of unoccupied houses that are left free for them.

The culture of the fallow is not the culture of capitalism that we live in, which by its idolatrous nature builds on a permanent and totalitarian cult that needs consumer-workers seven days a week: Pay attention to all that I have said to you, and make no mention of the names of other gods... (23:13). And so a great need of our generation, perhaps the greatest, derives from the death of the seventh day, that was made to disappear from our collective symbolic code. Because the value of the seventh day is not only one seventh of the total: it is the yeast and salt in all the others, without it they remain unleavened and saltless. It is only the non-yoke of the seventh day that makes the yokes of all others sustainable, even easy and light.

We have let the seventh day be stolen from us, we bartered it with the culture of the weekend (where the poor are even poorer, the animals even more subdued, foreigners even more foreigners). And the night of the seventh day is inexorably darkening the other six. The earth has stopped breathing, and we miss its air. We have a duty to restore its breath to it and to ourselves, giving it back to our children who are entitled to live in a world with one day more that is different, to repeat the experience of the gift of time and earth.

But we can still hope. The prophecy of the seventh day is not dead – the Bible has preserved it for us. It also kept the judgment on our six days that have become seven identical days and has preserved its promise for us, too. The word is alive, it generates and regenerates us forever. It gives back time and land to us, it widens our horizons, it makes us feel and see the clearest skies: Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up,  and they saw the God of Israel. There was under his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness. (24:9 -10)

 Further commentaries by Luigino Bruni in Avvenire are available through the Avvenire Editorial

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An opportunity for reflection and action on the many forms of modern day slavery

by Luigino Bruni

Logo Anno Santo Misericordia ridAccording to biblical humanism every jubilee year is an anniversary of mercy, but it is above all social, economic-political mercy: it was a crucial element in the jubilee year of the Jews to free those slaves who had become debt slaves. If we want this jubilee year not to remain a private and intimate matter of individual Christians, we must seize this great opportunity that Pope Francis gives us to bring about major initiatives of forgiveness and mercy in the economic, banking and civil world. One possible way of doing this would be to question ourselves about finance and about the many debts and slaves of our times who have been enslaved by a bad system.

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An Appeal for Civil and Economic Mercy

An opportunity for reflection and action on the many forms of modern day slavery by Luigino Bruni According to biblical humanism every jubilee year is an anniversary of mercy, but it is above all social, economic-political mercy: it was a crucial element in the jubilee year of the Jews to free those...
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    [title] => Dieu pleure avec nous! #prayforParis
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In order to dedicate itself entirely to the events in Paris, tomorrow's Avvenire is changing its Sunday edition and the 3rd article of Luigino Bruni on Ecclesiastes will not be published. We are publishing the opening words of it only, that were written thinking of the Paris events.

by Luigino Bruni

prayforParis Michel Pochet rid"And this blood smells the same as on the day when the brother told the other brother: »Let's go to the fields.«".

Salvatore Quasimodo, Uomo del mio tempo (Man of My Time)

Everything is an infinite Abel. An eternal Good Friday. Now it is the time for tears mingled with those of the French brothers.

I was writing the last lines of this article when the news of Paris reached to me, inflicting a deep wound in my heart. I stopped thinking and writing: all I felt was endless pain inside. "All is vanity", this was the first message I received during the night from Parisian friends. The song of Qohelet continues to sound, but today it is mixed with our tears. The Bible still gives us words to express unspeakable, unthinkable and absurd pain. Everything is an infinite Abel.

[fulltext] =>

Dieu pleure avec nous! is a painting by Michel Pochet made in memory of the events of Paris on 13 November 2015

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Noi ne pubblichiamo l'incipit, scritto pensando proprio ai fatti di Parigi. 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In order to dedicate itself entirely to the events in Paris, tomorrow's Avvenire is changing its Sunday edition and the 3rd article of Luigino Bruni on Ecclesiastes will not be published. We are publishing the opening words of it only, that were written thinking of the Paris events.

by Luigino Bruni

prayforParis Michel Pochet rid"And this blood smells the same as on the day when the brother told the other brother: »Let's go to the fields.«".

Salvatore Quasimodo, Uomo del mio tempo (Man of My Time)

Everything is an infinite Abel. An eternal Good Friday. Now it is the time for tears mingled with those of the French brothers.

I was writing the last lines of this article when the news of Paris reached to me, inflicting a deep wound in my heart. I stopped thinking and writing: all I felt was endless pain inside. "All is vanity", this was the first message I received during the night from Parisian friends. The song of Qohelet continues to sound, but today it is mixed with our tears. The Bible still gives us words to express unspeakable, unthinkable and absurd pain. Everything is an infinite Abel.

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Dieu pleure avec nous! #prayforParis

In order to dedicate itself entirely to the events in Paris, tomorrow's Avvenire is changing its Sunday edition and the 3rd article of Luigino Bruni on Ecclesiastes will not be published. We are publishing the opening words of it only, that were written thinking of the Paris events. by Luigino Brun...
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    [title] => Nobel Prize for Economy: reverse trend
    [alias] => nobel-prize-for-economy-reverse-trend
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The 2015 Nobel Prize in Economics went to British-born Angus Deaton for “his studies on consumption choices, poverty and development.”

by Luigino Bruni

published in Focolare.org on 14/10/2015

Angus Deaton ridThe 2015 Nobel Prize awarded to Angus Deaton for his studies on economic development, wellbeing, inequality, consumption choices and the determination of poverty is a very important sign: after years of the financial crisis, Stockholm and its consultants continued to award economists who had studied and promoted economy and finance that contributed to generating the crisis. In this most important seat of contemporary science and social sciences, the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Deaton has returned to promoting the really all-around social scientists of the world, and advocates of a political or civil science which is at the origin of modern economy.

[fulltext] =>

Stockholm’s policy has been somewhat bizarre over the last years: from 2010 to 2013, while capitalism was running the risk of an implosion under an unprecedented financial crisis, the Nobel Prizes for Economy were awarded to some economists who were among the major advocates of the economic and financial paradigm that was revealing all its tragic limits. It was almost as if during a summer with the highest number of arson crimes ever, the award was to go to those who studied sophisticated fire-lighting techniques. This is why the Nobel Prize this time, and in some way that of last year assigned to the Frenchman, Jean Tirole, could be a sign of a reverse trend since the award to Deaton closely resembles the awards given to Amartya Sen, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Elinor Ostrom and more recently to Eugene Fama and Lloyd Stowell Shapley.

We must not forget that the financial and economic crisis we experienced and are still undergoing, is not independent from the economic theories of the last decade, since unlike the astrophysicists whose theories do not modify the orbit of the planets, economists and their theories strongly impact on economic choices. Over the last years the best of the world’s economic departments were increasingly filled with more mathematicians with increasingly scarce humanistic backgrounds, and experts of hyper-specialised models most of whom were no longer capable of having an overall view of the economic system and thus associate their models with the socio-economic reality.

Besides the award to Deaton following that given to Tirole, this could indicate a return to a more European economic theory, which pays greater attention to the social dimension of the profession, and more sensitivity to the themes of collective wellbeing and not only individual profits and turnovers. This probable dawning will, however, reach its peak if the next Nobel prizes highlight more philosopher economists and less mathematician economists, as once described by the British economist, Robert Sugden, in 1991: “The economist today needs to return to being more of a philosopher and less of a mathematician.” It was an invitation which at that time was hardly noticed by professionals of the sector, but we may still be on time to do so.

Angus Deaton is furthermore, an economist who not only writes mathematic articles but also books. We recommend his latest work, “The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality,” in which the new Nobel laureate and authentic social scientist and rightful heir of this co-citizen, Adam Smith (philosopher and economist), asked himself whether humanity will, in the future, enjoy a period of progress without inequality, a fundamental issue today when we are paying the price for progress with growing inequality in the world and a decrease in happiness. Economics could return to being a moral, society-friendly science if it will start again to ask itself questions which were too rapidly abandoned to respond to easier queries, less useful to human progress.”

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Il parere di Luigino Bruni [access] => 1 [hits] => 2415 [xreference] => [featured] => 0 [language] => en-GB [on_img_default] => [readmore] => 3416 [ordering] => 17 [category_title] => EN - Bruni various [category_route] => economia-civile/it-editoriali-vari/it-bruni-varie [category_access] => 1 [category_alias] => en-bruni-various [published] => 1 [parents_published] => 1 [lft] => 83 [author] => Antonella Ferrucci [author_email] => ferrucci.anto@gmail.com [parent_title] => IT - Editoriali vari [parent_id] => 893 [parent_route] => economia-civile/it-editoriali-vari [parent_alias] => it-editoriali-vari [rating] => 0 [rating_count] => 0 [alternative_readmore] => [layout] => [params] => Joomla\Registry\Registry Object ( [data:protected] => stdClass Object ( [article_layout] => _:default [show_title] => 1 [link_titles] => 1 [show_intro] => 1 [info_block_position] => 0 [info_block_show_title] => 1 [show_category] => 1 [link_category] => 1 [show_parent_category] => 1 [link_parent_category] => 1 [show_associations] => 0 [flags] => 1 [show_author] => 0 [link_author] => 0 [show_create_date] => 1 [show_modify_date] => 0 [show_publish_date] => 1 [show_item_navigation] => 1 [show_vote] => 0 [show_readmore] => 0 [show_readmore_title] => 0 [readmore_limit] => 100 [show_tags] => 1 [show_icons] => 1 [show_print_icon] => 1 [show_email_icon] => 1 [show_hits] => 0 [record_hits] => 1 [show_noauth] => 0 [urls_position] => 1 [captcha] => [show_publishing_options] => 1 [show_article_options] => 1 [save_history] => 1 [history_limit] => 10 [show_urls_images_frontend] => 0 [show_urls_images_backend] => 1 [targeta] => 0 [targetb] => 0 [targetc] => 0 [float_intro] => left [float_fulltext] => left [category_layout] => _:blog [show_category_heading_title_text] => 0 [show_category_title] => 0 [show_description] => 0 [show_description_image] => 0 [maxLevel] => 0 [show_empty_categories] => 0 [show_no_articles] => 1 [show_subcat_desc] => 0 [show_cat_num_articles] => 0 [show_cat_tags] => 1 [show_base_description] => 1 [maxLevelcat] => -1 [show_empty_categories_cat] => 0 [show_subcat_desc_cat] => 0 [show_cat_num_articles_cat] => 0 [num_leading_articles] => 0 [num_intro_articles] => 14 [num_columns] => 2 [num_links] => 0 [multi_column_order] => 1 [show_subcategory_content] => -1 [show_pagination_limit] => 1 [filter_field] => hide [show_headings] => 1 [list_show_date] => 0 [date_format] => [list_show_hits] => 1 [list_show_author] => 1 [list_show_votes] => 0 [list_show_ratings] => 0 [orderby_pri] => none [orderby_sec] => rdate [order_date] => published [show_pagination] => 2 [show_pagination_results] => 1 [show_featured] => show [show_feed_link] => 1 [feed_summary] => 0 [feed_show_readmore] => 0 [sef_advanced] => 1 [sef_ids] => 1 [custom_fields_enable] => 1 [show_page_heading] => 0 [layout_type] => blog [menu_text] => 1 [menu_show] => 1 [secure] => 0 [helixultimatemenulayout] => {"width":600,"menualign":"right","megamenu":0,"showtitle":1,"faicon":"","customclass":"","dropdown":"right","badge":"","badge_position":"","badge_bg_color":"","badge_text_color":"","layout":[]} [helixultimate_enable_page_title] => 1 [helixultimate_page_title_alt] => Economia Civile [helixultimate_page_subtitle] => Bruni Varie [helixultimate_page_title_heading] => h2 [page_title] => Bruni various [page_description] => [page_rights] => [robots] => [access-view] => 1 ) [initialized:protected] => 1 [separator] => . ) [displayDate] => 2015-10-14 07:43:33 [tags] => Joomla\CMS\Helper\TagsHelper Object ( [tagsChanged:protected] => [replaceTags:protected] => [typeAlias] => [itemTags] => Array ( ) ) [slug] => 16396:nobel-prize-for-economy-reverse-trend [parent_slug] => 893:it-editoriali-vari [catslug] => 891:en-bruni-various [event] => stdClass Object ( [afterDisplayTitle] => [beforeDisplayContent] => [afterDisplayContent] => ) [text] =>

The 2015 Nobel Prize in Economics went to British-born Angus Deaton for “his studies on consumption choices, poverty and development.”

by Luigino Bruni

published in Focolare.org on 14/10/2015

Angus Deaton ridThe 2015 Nobel Prize awarded to Angus Deaton for his studies on economic development, wellbeing, inequality, consumption choices and the determination of poverty is a very important sign: after years of the financial crisis, Stockholm and its consultants continued to award economists who had studied and promoted economy and finance that contributed to generating the crisis. In this most important seat of contemporary science and social sciences, the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Deaton has returned to promoting the really all-around social scientists of the world, and advocates of a political or civil science which is at the origin of modern economy.

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Nobel Prize for Economy: reverse trend

The 2015 Nobel Prize in Economics went to British-born Angus Deaton for “his studies on consumption choices, poverty and development.” by Luigino Bruni published in Focolare.org on 14/10/2015 The 2015 Nobel Prize awarded to Angus Deaton for his studies on economic development, wellbeing, inequality,...
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Pope Francis - Laudato si’. Taking care of the planet with prophecy and without demonization

by Luigino Bruni

published in pdf Il Regno (1.52 MB) n.7/2015

Logo Il Regno 2Our era, the beginning of the twenty-first century will be remembered for the end of the critique of capitalism, which characterized much of the twentieth century. Capitalism has become the environment in which we live and move, and we are so immersed in it that we no longer have the cultural ability to look at it in order to analyze or criticize it, neither to ask it some fundamental questions of equality, justice and truth.

[fulltext] =>

The various forms of responsible enterprise or the economy of the non-profit sector itself were conceived within the same capitalist system and are functional and increasingly essential to it. In Italy, for example, about half of the large non-profit organizations - including some prominent Catholic movements - receive direct or indirect funding from gaming multinationals.

In this serious shortage of critical thinking the value and historical importance of Laudato si’ is clear, which itself is also a lucid and prophetic critique of financial and technological capitalism. And it works on various levels that are all essential.

First of all, the Pope Francis' Laudato si’ is a great concrete discourse of the common good. It is not a discourse "on" common good as a category (there are far too many of these, even among Catholics), but it is an exercise of common good - were we to look at it through the standards of the ancient world (Classics) we should say that in this encyclical, the common good is not the material but the formal object discussed: it takes a look at the world from the perspective of the common good, which becomes the ethical criterion for global assessment.

Today, especially in the West, we cannot see the global ethical issue precisely because we lack the category of the common good - and also that of the common goods that are closely linked to the former one - which is the great absentee of our society of consumption and finance.

Yet our generation has experienced in its own flesh what the common evils are: world wars, atomic danger, epidemics and, in our days, globalized terrorism. We have learned what it means to be a body when the bombs were falling on the houses of both the rich and the poor, when suicidal-homicidal madness was killing managers and workers alike; but we have not learned the wisdom of the common good from the experience of the common evil.

We have collectively failed to learn that the primary good of a society (primary in the sense that if it is missing, the real secondary goods are threatened, too) is the common good, that of all and every single one. And so, day after day, law after law, no-law after no-law, we are creating the "civilization of private interest". It is supported by more and more sophisticated ideologies so as to convince everyone that 'waste' is a price to pay for the welfare of the elite, and that it is normal and inevitable that 10% of the world's population uses energy for air conditioning in their apartments and for their SUVs, and 90% that has neither air conditioning nor SUVs are doomed to suffer the consequences of a planet that is increasingly polluted by those above them.

Yet again, human history confirms and amplifies the truth of the Gospel: not only Lazarus is left to stay under the table of the rich man to pick up the crumbs of his wealth, but from that same table which is laden with more and more products coming from the exploited lands of the world's many poor there is also waste, sludge and dirt now dripping on the head of Lazarus, making those few crumbs of bread inedible.

 

An integral humanism

Pope Francis can see all this and tell about it to all, to make us at least a little less comfortable in our opulent banquets. And he does so with the freedom that comes from those who only serve the interest of truth that does not depend on the funding of multinationals and financial policies, and so he can give voice to those who do not have it, and denounce the economy of the new rich men, generators of polluted and unfair crumbs with an unrepressed force and courage. A better take on the common good, perhaps the only one paying it justice, is that of those who position themselves under the table next to Lazarus, and look upwards from there.

Another topic that determines the entire thought of the encyclical is the relationship between man and earth seen as reciprocal relationship between equals, because man and earth are both "creation" (ch. II ), hence the reciprocity between human beings and between us and the earth. There is only one guardianship: that of the other man ("Am I my brother's keeper?": Gen 4,9), and custody of the earth (Adam has to preserve the garden and make it fruitful; cf. Gen 2,15). The author of Genesis used the same word (shamar) in both cases - even if it was denied later - so as to remind us that if I don't take care of the other man, of every other man and woman, I will not be able to take care of the land or even myself (unless I take care of the other, I soon become incapable even of taking care of myself: all that remains is only nihilistic hedonism).

Where there is no custody, fratricide takes the place of brotherhood and the earth is stained by blood - but God and his true friends who are not adulators can still smell the blood of the victims ("The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground.": Gen 4,10). And it is for this reason that the "integral ecology" (ch. IV) that Laudato si’ talks about can only come from an "integral humanism" (ch. III).

"Distorted" anthropocentrism - as the Pope defines it - is also fuelled by some partial Christian theologies and sees the entire universe as a function of the well-being of human beings. It is the first error to be corrected in order to build a proper relationship with the earth and with nature, a relationship that Francis (in a Franciscan way) calls fraternity: “when our hearts are authentically open to universal communion, this sense of fraternity excludes nothing and no one” (par. 92).

At the same time, man really stands in the heart of the process of the deterioration life the planet is suffering at present, a deterioration that does not call the survival of the earth into question (which has survived some far more devastating "crises" than the one we are producing) but the survival of homo sapiens. Furthermore - and the Pope emphasizes this in many passages of his letter - instead of "taking care" of it, man's irresponsible behaviour is ransacking land and producing a significant loss of biodiversity on the planet and the death of many species.

Some Italian and other commentators, self-appointed lovers of the free market - without explaining what they mean by "market" and "free" - wrote that Pope Francis is against the market and against economic freedom, and they see this as an expression of his anti-modernism and even Marxism. Actually, if we read the text without ideological glasses, we find some very important things about the market and the economy. Francis reminds us that the market and the enterprise are valuable allies for the common good if they do not become an entirety. The market is a dimension of good social life, which is essential today for every common good. But the words of the economies are neither the only nor the first ones.

 

The rule of mutual benefit

First, the Pope denounces the distortion of the market. If it is true that the golden rule of the market is that of the "mutual benefit" - as Adam Smith, Antonio Genovesi and the best traditions of economic thought remind us - and not the advantage of one side at the expense of the other, that also means that when companies prey on people and the earth (as they often do), they are denying the very nature of the market. What the Pope does is call the economy and the market to return to their real vocation: mutual benefit or, in the words of Genovesi, "mutual assistance" (in Lezioni di economia civile - Lessons of Civil Economy-, written between 1765 and 1767).

Finally, if we recognize mutual benefit as a fundamental law of the civilian market, and perhaps extend it also to the relationship with other living species and the earth (many experiences in the relationship between man and the earth can also be read in this sense), it still must not be the only law of life. In this the Pope is in tune with the great contemporary economists, including the Nobel Prize laureate A. K. Sen.

In his works on justice Sen speaks of the obligations of power, and he does it with some of his inspiration coming from the Indian religious tradition. The obligations of power compel us to go beyond mutual benefit and the contract - which is its main instrument. Mutual benefit and the contract are not sufficient for the construction of a just society. There are moral and civil obligations that cannot be brought back to the principle of mutual benefit. In particular, the obligations of power are critical when we're dealing with children or with other, non-human species.

When we are in a position to exercise power over other living beings that are weaker than us and definitely depend on our power, we must act on the basis of the recognition of the asymmetrical ability we have to do things that have grave consequences for the lives of others (cf. A. Sen, The Idea of Justice, Harvard University Press, Harvard 2009).

We need to act with responsibility towards creation because technology has put us in the objective conditions of being able to produce very serious consequences unilaterally to other living things with which we are connected to each other. Everything in the universe is alive and calls us to responsibility.

Finally, the question of "ecological debt" is very important, too (par. 52). It is discussed in one of the highest and most prophetic passages of the encyclical. The ruthless logic of the debts of the states that dominates the earth pushes entire populations onto their knees (just like Greece, but not only), and keeps many others at bay. A lot of power in the world is exercised in the name of financial debt and credit. But there is also a large "ecological debt" the South could claim from the North: 10% of humanity has built their welfare discharging costs into the atmosphere of all, and they continue to produce "climate change" with devastating effects on many of the poorest countries.

The term "change" is misleading because it is ethically neutral. The Pope speaks of "pollution" and the deterioration of the "common good" called "climate" (par. 23). The deterioration of the climate contributes to the desertification of entire regions that have a great effect on the many forms of misery, the deaths of children, women, men, and on migration (cf. n. 25).

This immense "ecological debt" and global justice is not taken into account in the tables of the powerful, and there is not the slightest ethical consideration in the closures of our borders to those who come to us because we have burned their homes. This ecological debt does not weigh at all in the political world. No Troika condemns a country because it has polluted and made a desert of another. And so the ecological debt continues to grow amidst the indifference of the great and powerful.

Our global civilization has an extreme and vital need of prophecy. Prophecy has always been the first food of the common good, in and outside of religions. But where are the prophets today? And those few who listen to them?

Pope Francis is one of the few prophets of our time, and, thank God, he is also listened to. He is certainly listened to and loved by the many Lazarus'. Let us hope that he is also heard by some rich men: "If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead." (Lk 16,31).

 

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Custodire la terra con profezia ma senza demonizzazioni. 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Pope Francis - Laudato si’. Taking care of the planet with prophecy and without demonization

by Luigino Bruni

published in pdf Il Regno (1.52 MB) n.7/2015

Logo Il Regno 2Our era, the beginning of the twenty-first century will be remembered for the end of the critique of capitalism, which characterized much of the twentieth century. Capitalism has become the environment in which we live and move, and we are so immersed in it that we no longer have the cultural ability to look at it in order to analyze or criticize it, neither to ask it some fundamental questions of equality, justice and truth.

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By Lazarus' Side

Pope Francis - Laudato si’. Taking care of the planet with prophecy and without demonization by Luigino Bruni published in pdf Il Regno (1.52 MB) n.7/2015 Our era, the beginning of the twenty-first century will be remembered for the end of the critique of capitalism, which characteriz...
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An Interview with Luigino Bruni

by Antonella Ferrucci

140712 Vaticano 01 ridLuigino Bruni was one of the protagonists of the conference entitled "The Global Common Good: Towards a more inclusive economy” that brought together the highest authorities of global economy in the Vatican on 11th and 12th July. This was the first time he met Pope Francis in person and had lunch with him.

We would like to know how he feels about this meeting and what impressed him most.

I had never met Pope Francis in person before, let alone having lunch in his presence. I was impressed by many things, all positive. First of all, his intense and attentive listening. There were many people who sat next to him (on a chair that was left empty on purpose), to tell him their dreams, aspirations and requests. Among them, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate M. Yunus, who said ‘Help me, Holy Father, to spread finance for the poor’.

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He listened to them as if he had come only for them, and forgot even about the meal. Then it also impressed me to see his teaching 'incarnated' in his actions and behaviour: he did not say many words, but “spoke” by being with us for two hours, and through this powerful language he managed to say how important economy is in his vision of the church. Then his gratitude: the word he used most was 'thanks': thank you for your research efforts, thank you.' He said that several times to us. ‘Thank you for what you do’, he said repeatedly, and not out of courtesy, many times, throughout the meeting.

What kind of pope is Pope Francis, in your experience?130520 Luigino Bruni rid

I only spent two hours with him. But I follow him with much attention from that first evening on St. Peter's Square. He is a humble pope, in the truest sense of the word, who puts himself on par with others, neither above nor below the person in front of him. I really like his language: he is a master in the use of images, which is very reminiscent of that of the Gospels. And just as Jesus in the Gospels, through his words he touches the hearts of the people, of the wise ones and the little ones. I found it a brilliant idea how he translated – during that lunch – the somewhat complicated concept of anthropological reductionism with the metaphor of the still in which the wine (man) enters and  grappa comes out (which is something else, maybe useful, but something else). ‘Today there is no other person as authoritative as the pope in the worl’, as Governor of the Bank of England Carney told me who was sitting next to me at lunch. It's true, and the Pope has taught us to take part in this sort of ‘Davos of the poor’, in order not to remain indifferent or distant, impartial observers. It is necessary to select a departure point for our observations on the world.

Which one should it be?

140712 Vaticano 02 ridHe chose that of Lazarus (of the parable), the beggar who is under the table, with the dogs, ‘who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man's table’ (Luke 16). He who places himself next to Lazarus looks at the world from under the tables of the rich, with his eyes directed upwards. From there you can see things differently: Lazarus can see the rich man above himself, ‘clothed in purple and fine linen (...) who feasted sumptuously every day’. But he can also see heavens. Francis therefore invites us to do the same, to look at the world, but also heavens, along with the many Lazzaruses of today, many of whom are the product of our capitalism that tends to exclude. Being a passionate promoter of the Economy of Communion, and as a lover of justice, I could not feel more at ease in the company of Lazarus, and Francis (Bergoglio but also Francis of Assisi). At the end of the meeting I proposed to make this ‘Davos of the poor” a biannual occasion, and my invitation has a good chance of being accepted, so that this view of the world and of capitalism may become the expression of a constant caring attention, with criticism and love for our times.

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An Interview with Luigino Bruni

by Antonella Ferrucci

140712 Vaticano 01 ridLuigino Bruni was one of the protagonists of the conference entitled "The Global Common Good: Towards a more inclusive economy” that brought together the highest authorities of global economy in the Vatican on 11th and 12th July. This was the first time he met Pope Francis in person and had lunch with him.

We would like to know how he feels about this meeting and what impressed him most.

I had never met Pope Francis in person before, let alone having lunch in his presence. I was impressed by many things, all positive. First of all, his intense and attentive listening. There were many people who sat next to him (on a chair that was left empty on purpose), to tell him their dreams, aspirations and requests. Among them, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate M. Yunus, who said ‘Help me, Holy Father, to spread finance for the poor’.

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My Meeting with Pope Francis

An Interview with Luigino Bruni by Antonella Ferrucci Luigino Bruni was one of the protagonists of the conference entitled "The Global Common Good: Towards a more inclusive economy” that brought together the highest authorities of global economy in the Vatican on 11th and 12th July. This was the fir...
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«I abstain from Coffee»

By Marta Todeschini

Published in L'Eco di Bergamo.it on June 02, 2013

Slot machine«We have to protest and do it well: gambling is the scandal of our third millennium." Luigino Bruni  is not a man to talk quietly. He makes it clear that "today those who loves the poor must also fight the addiction to gambling, such as slot machines," bringing up memories strikes and sit-ins. Have you walked into a bar for a coffee and seen the machines? One leaves, but not without protest.

[fulltext] =>

Bruni, professor of Economics at the University Lumsa of Rome, has done so for some time. He has also happened to interrupt a conference: "I ​​was invited to a circle Acli. Down the hall I noticed the slot machines: the only thing I could talk about was my outrage."

Professor Bruni, why does an economist deal with slot machines and such things?

"I think those who are economists should take care of people and be social observers. I am especially committed to the cooperative, social sphere and Economy of Communion (Bruni is the coordinator of the International Commission of Economy of Communion, alternative model of ethical economy born in the nineties within the Focolare Movement, founded by Chiara Lubich, ed.). Today, one very serious form of poverty comes from the addiction to gambling. I am also interested in gambling as a citizen. I have such disdain for this age-old problem that has once again become an epidemic, a social sin, a mechanism to raise cash for the state. So, I see there is civil and intellectual responsibility in creating this gambling problem."

Do you feel support for your viewpoint, or are you a lone voice crying in the desert?

I am writing for Avvenire which, like you, has been campaigning strongly against gambling. But, talking about institutions, I have been saddened to realize how the current government, which should have had a special sensitivity regarding issues that are clearly wrong, has not done much in reality. I do not see many hopeful signs. "

On what issue should the legislature intervene first?

"The most grave issue is the proliferation of game rooms and VLTs, which are inhumane places. Let us ask ourselves: who gives them permits? It is well established that organized crime is often behind all this, recycling and laundering money. The law and public authorities can do a lot: they can simply stop granting these licenses. "
Instead, municipalities and police stations, questioned by committees of citizens who oppose the opening of new game halls, say they have their hands tied.
"There is much work to be done in terms of public opinion. We have to do much more, such as hold strikes." Like your coffee abstention in certain bars? "No, I don’t have my coffee in such bars with slot machines, but I speak, I talk and protest. This is important: if I explain my reasons publicly, I bring greater attention to the issue, this is important behavior. This is what I call strategic altruism, the potential for reproach at one's own expense."

Do you always come out unscathed?

"No, it does not always go well. Sometimes they get angry, but it is fine. When I go to buy a newspaper and I see the stacks of scratch card games that almost prevent one from seeing the newspaperman, I tell them that I am not going to buy the newspaper, and I am ashamed that there are places like this. Once, I went to a service area off the Florence-Rome highway, and the cashier asked me if I wanted a scratchcard. "Please, do not ask me these questions. I wanted a cappuccino," I replied. Three months later, I went there again, and the cashier recognized me: "You are the gentleman from last time." This means that a civil reproach, in a personal way, not made by a policeman, from a citizen who has nothing to gain, done for the common good, affects people in such way that they remember it. The bottom line is that culture can be changed in this way."

You believe the culture of communion should be the forfront of our culture.

"The culture of communion is the opposite of the culture of selfishness, which is important today in an era lacking social ties. There are some behaviors that are obviously wrong and should not be regulated: they must simply be eliminated. We would not say that we regulate murder or theft. A civilization simply says no to these things."

A spokesperson for Italy’s Game System announced just the other day that their aim should be to the offer gambling in identifiable and recognizable places.

"This is like saying: let’s close the brothels for prostitutes. I believe that civilization has the right to say: we do not want people going off to gamble. Will there be the illegal gambling? Fine, fight it. Words aren't enough; since it is there, it should be regulated. Gambling creates poverty, and it must be eliminated. There is also another level we need to work on. "

Which one?

"In addition to the legal level, there is also the level of the owners of bars and clubs. On the one hand, we must protest and request removal of the slot machines. Those who take them out should be rewarded by civil society with ethical branding."

Like the window sticker that our newspaper created, which many are proud of?

"We need to take actions like this one, creating civil rewards. Sometimes I also think of rewards such as monetary prizes, forms of compensation with money recovered from the mafia for those who decide to remove the machines. If we do not want to give money, there should beat least a reward of tax incentives. A lot can be accomplished if the political and civil spheres disapprove and apply pressure."

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«I abstain from Coffee»

By Marta Todeschini

Published in L'Eco di Bergamo.it on June 02, 2013

Slot machine«We have to protest and do it well: gambling is the scandal of our third millennium." Luigino Bruni  is not a man to talk quietly. He makes it clear that "today those who loves the poor must also fight the addiction to gambling, such as slot machines," bringing up memories strikes and sit-ins. Have you walked into a bar for a coffee and seen the machines? One leaves, but not without protest.

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The economist Bruni against slot machines

«I abstain from Coffee» By Marta Todeschini Published in L'Eco di Bergamo.it on June 02, 2013 «We have to protest and do it well: gambling is the scandal of our third millennium." Luigino Bruni  is not a man to talk quietly. He makes it clear that "today those who loves the poor must ...
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    [title] => The «hunger for time» of consumerism
    [alias] => the-lhunger-for-timer-of-consumerism
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Today the marked offers us entertainment, but has lost the real sense of celebrations

By Luigino Bruni

published on Mondo e Missione, May 2012

LOGO_Mondo_e_missione_rid

On 30 May, Professor Luigino Bruni will hold one of the main talks at the theological-pastoral Congresses, at the Fair of Milan, in the context of the VII Would Meeting for Families. The theme he will address will be: “The family, work and celebrations in today’s world.”

There is a new form of hunger that is striking our consumer and capitalistic societies: hunger for time. One of the reasons one time at  the root of the prohibition on lending money with interest in return (or usury), was the conviction that time was not a good at human beings disposition, but belonged to God.

And therefore, if time belongs to God, and if in a money loan what changes between the giving of the loan and its restitution is only time (that has passed), and if I ask for interest on it, its as if I was making a profit on time.

[fulltext] =>

Today we observe, instead, the opposite scenario: time is the principal resource exchanged on the market: in fact, what are housecleaning tools, frozen foods, dry cleaners, caregivers, domestic cleaners, high speed trains and air travel… if not the selling and acquisition of time? The «market of time» is by far on the increase and the one showing constant growth.

The crucial question, however, becomes: buy time to do what? In fact, one of the main paradoxes of our times is found on this plane: we kill ourselves to buy time freed up from occupations that we do not like (or that we no longer like), without generally having any idea on the good use of time freed up or bought. And so the absurd happens: the time, which we acquire thanks to the wealth earned in the labour market, we invest to still work more or to consume, thus falling into a «vicious cycle» totally within the economic sphere. We are free to move in many places, but essentially slaves of the one meta-place which is called the market. This hunger for time, as a consequence, can never be satiated, creating with it various neurosis and illnesses.

An evident sign of this new illness is the transformation of feasts into entertainment. In traditional cultures, work time was counted in relationship to the time of feast days. A feast day was celebrated because it was the fruit of work time (in the fields or in the factory), and required a lot of time in both its preparation and in its celebration. Religious feasts, baptisms and matrimonies were all prepared long before the date, and celebrated for a long time during them: time was their main fuel.

The feast, then, could not be bought on any market, because it was an event of gratuity, a relational good, and for this reason the feast was always a slow experience. In fact, the «waste of time» is really one of the fundamental characteristics of a feast, otherwise it would not be one.

The current culture of famine of time no longer knows what a feast is (because it uses and consumes, and does not love, time), but entertainment, which instead can and must be bought, does not even require the company of others. Entertainment does not need time, but must be quick, fast. If today we do not recuperate a healthy rapport with time-as-gratuity, and we instead continue to buy and use it, we will progressively loose contact with the joy of living, which does not come from entertainment (that perhaps knows pleasure), but only from a feast-celebration.

With this article, we conclude our journey of “To Fight Hunger I will change my life.” I warmly thank Luigino Bruni – whose collaboration with Mondo e Missione will continue in other ways – for his valuable and appreciated contributions.

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Today the marked offers us entertainment, but has lost the real sense of celebrations

By Luigino Bruni

published on Mondo e Missione, May 2012

LOGO_Mondo_e_missione_rid

On 30 May, Professor Luigino Bruni will hold one of the main talks at the theological-pastoral Congresses, at the Fair of Milan, in the context of the VII Would Meeting for Families. The theme he will address will be: “The family, work and celebrations in today’s world.”

There is a new form of hunger that is striking our consumer and capitalistic societies: hunger for time. One of the reasons one time at  the root of the prohibition on lending money with interest in return (or usury), was the conviction that time was not a good at human beings disposition, but belonged to God.

And therefore, if time belongs to God, and if in a money loan what changes between the giving of the loan and its restitution is only time (that has passed), and if I ask for interest on it, its as if I was making a profit on time.

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The «hunger for time» of consumerism

Today the marked offers us entertainment, but has lost the real sense of celebrations By Luigino Bruni published on Mondo e Missione, May 2012 On 30 May, Professor Luigino Bruni will hold one of the main talks at the theological-pastoral Congresses, at the Fair of Milan, in the context of the ...
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    [title] => The satisfied West had lost hope
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You fight the "not chosen hunger" by keeping alive in each person the "good hunger" of a "not yet"

by Luigino Bruni

published on Mondo e Missione, January 2012

LOGO_Mondo_e_missioneA personal experience. A few months ago I went on a trip to Kenya for lectures and conferences. Going around the country I saw, or rather glimpsed from a distance, many forms of poverty, misery, and even true hunger.

But the strongest image that I took with me, from encountering part of the African culture, was not that of emptiness, but of fullness. In particular, I was impressed to see many young people studying for exams crowded at night under the streetlights, because they had no electricity at home.

[fulltext] =>

I thought my students in Milan, slacking in their studies because they have lost that which motivates a young person towards life: the desire for the future, the hunger for life. As for poverty, there also exists a positive variation of the term hunger, which refers precisely to the lack of something I do not have, and motivates me to improve myself and the others.

After the war, Europe was capable of great things, that is to rebuild morally, civilly, and economically the countries destroyed by civil war between Christians, with millions of dead and rivers of debris, because  those peoples had strong desire and need of finally building a new world. When this type of hunger is missing in persons and peoples (as happens in Europe today), it also becomes very difficult to deal seriously and effectively with the "negative hunger," which must be fought, for where there is no enthusiasm and desire to live, there can be no energy to take care of others. One fights hunger not by choice and suffers (from nature and/or others, from wars, bad relationships…), by keeping alive in persons the positive hunger of a "not yet," which we want to get to, and compel us to the commitment.

The West and its economic and social development model is showing all of its fragility, and not just because of finance, but a deficit in anthropology that has a lot to do with the absence of this positive hunger. If this “good hunger” is satisfied of life, which is an expression of a call to transcendence in each person, with goods and not with the cultivation of humanity and relationships, the most important asset of any economy and society becomes less in each person: wanting to get up in the morning to improve our lives.

If that better world that those young people of Kenya dream of is only the African version of this model of development, waking up from that dream will be dramatic, because it definitely will not be able to keep its promises.

Africa and other regions of the world are still only partly achieved by capitalism. Now they face the great challenge of giving birth to a market economy and a post-consumerist economic development, more communal and supportive, more in harmony with the environment, and less materialistic. We must avoid the deadly mistake of turning off the desire and hunger for life in young people, only filling the void with goods. The goods are important, sometimes essential, but they become "goods" when they do not extinguish the hunger of good things that are more important than merchandises.

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You fight the "not chosen hunger" by keeping alive in each person the "good hunger" of a "not yet"

by Luigino Bruni

published on Mondo e Missione, January 2012

LOGO_Mondo_e_missioneA personal experience. A few months ago I went on a trip to Kenya for lectures and conferences. Going around the country I saw, or rather glimpsed from a distance, many forms of poverty, misery, and even true hunger.

But the strongest image that I took with me, from encountering part of the African culture, was not that of emptiness, but of fullness. In particular, I was impressed to see many young people studying for exams crowded at night under the streetlights, because they had no electricity at home.

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The satisfied West had lost hope

You fight the "not chosen hunger" by keeping alive in each person the "good hunger" of a "not yet" by Luigino Bruni published on Mondo e Missione, January 2012 A personal experience. A few months ago I went on a trip to Kenya for lectures and conferences. Going around the country I saw, or rath...
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    [title] => The EoC: a way for everyone
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We are publishing in advanced the introduction to the 2011 EoC Report, which will be published shortly

by Luigino Bruni

Bruni_rid_modWe present to you the "2011 EoC Report," with gratitude - to God, to Chiara, the entrepreneurs, the commissions, and all the EoC actors; the report of among the most difficult year because of the global economies and certainly that of the West. We were astonished and rejoiced with the results of this difficult year. As you will see when you flip through the pages, the profits and the companies that are part of our grand project (it is called like this until we find a better word that best satisfy us) both have increased. But the quality of development projects in the world has also increase, brought ahead in an ever closer and effective collaboration with AMU, as well as the increase of communion with the people who received aid.

[fulltext] =>

While publishing these data we cannot forget the difficult situation, the worst in the last decades, which is going through the global economic system. It has complicated the lives of many of our companies and many of our fellow citizens, entrepreneurs, families, and especially the poor people who are suffering the consequences of the collapse of the financial system and much of the economic world, especially Europe. At the same time, never in the recent years has the EoC been looked at with interest by many with an increasing number of invitations to present it, many universities and cultural and economic centers of different countries talking about it (sometimes without us even knowing it). In other words, we are living in favorable time (kairos) for a new EoC season. In what sense?

The crises, both individual and collective, are ambivalent. We can get out of it worst if during the crisis our relations with ourselves, with God, with the others and with the world are worsened, but we can get out on top if the difficult moments help us to be silent, to discover or rediscover our true vocation, our “daimon” (in the words of Socrates). The charisms, such as that of Unity from which the EoC was born and nourished, are essential in moments of crisis because they have the task of indicating a path of positivity in times of passage. The crises that we are experiencing can and should be a favorable time to make a leap in the scale. It will be so, if we are able to make a new announcement of the Economy of Communion within the Focolare Movement (where in a distance of twenty years there is an entire generation gap from those early days), but also and above all, outside of itself, in the Church, and in the world.

But for this new phase to take place in this favorable time, there are two conditions necessary.

First, the EoC must be presented and understood for what it truly is: a great vision to change the entire economic system (“neither communism, nor consumerism, but communion,” Chiara); a different idea of capitalism. So far we have mostly presented the EoC as an ethic, a way for entrepreneurs, and developing projects for the poor, staying mainly within the Focolare Movement. We did it like St. Francis in relation to the church of St. Damian in Assisi. When Francis heard the call of God, “go Francis and reconstruct my Church,” he first understood it as a physical reconstruction (with stones and beams) of the ruined church of St. Damian. Francis realized only later that the Church to be rebuilt was not made of stone but the Church of Christ. This is the same for us as well and perhaps for an internal logic to the charisms (starting with the concrete and possible, and then the understanding that the mission is different and more universal), we have taken up the call of Chiara to give birth to a new Economy of Communion, taking care of the entrepreneurs and the poor of our Movement. Lately, however, even thanks to the big event in Sao Paulo (Brazil) last May, we understood, finally all together as a body, that the new economy that Chiara wanted and wants is more than this: that the EoC is a gift for everyone, a contribution to an economy of communion for everyone, an act of love to improve the lives of our people. It is like saying – changing metaphor – that today we do not see the EoC tree but its seed. There is nothing wrong with that, indeed there is much good to see and care for the seed, as long as we do not think that what we see today (the little more than eight hundred companies and the movement around them) is already the tree and not the seed.

And now we come to the second condition. In order to make this leap of scale – and thus begin to see a few leaves of the tree – we are asked, on one hand, that our projects may always be more credible both on the company side and that of helping the poor, and on the other hand, that the communion of goods may always be more a way of life of our communities, within and outside the businesses. If we want that the church becomes the Church, and that the seed becomes a tree, then it is necessary that the DNA of the seed is the right one, otherwise nothing will grow or the fruit will not be tasty and plentiful.

Happy New Year 2012, that it may be the year in which we begin to glimpse this new phase of the EoC, faithful to its roots, and for this pointed towards “that all may be one,” the great word of the charism of unity. And do not miss any opportunity to announce the EoC at all levels, by testimony but also with words, as Chiara’s prophecy, nothing more and nothing less of that blessed day in May 1991. Greetings to everyone, really to each one.

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We are publishing in advanced the introduction to the 2011 EoC Report, which will be published shortly

by Luigino Bruni

Bruni_rid_modWe present to you the "2011 EoC Report," with gratitude - to God, to Chiara, the entrepreneurs, the commissions, and all the EoC actors; the report of among the most difficult year because of the global economies and certainly that of the West. We were astonished and rejoiced with the results of this difficult year. As you will see when you flip through the pages, the profits and the companies that are part of our grand project (it is called like this until we find a better word that best satisfy us) both have increased. But the quality of development projects in the world has also increase, brought ahead in an ever closer and effective collaboration with AMU, as well as the increase of communion with the people who received aid.

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The EoC: a way for everyone

We are publishing in advanced the introduction to the 2011 EoC Report, which will be published shortly by Luigino Bruni We present to you the "2011 EoC Report," with gratitude - to God, to Chiara, the entrepreneurs, the commissions, and all the EoC actors; the report of among the most difficult year...