When I was little, harvest in our church was still about loaves and fishes. My church, All Saints’ in St Andrews, was built with money from the Younger brewing dynasty as a mission to the fisherfolk. Lady Younger wanted to plough the profits from barley back into the sea, to reap a fresh harvest of fishers of men. So our church was always hung with fishing nets at Harvest, and you’ll have your own memories, of churches full of sheaves of corn, windowsills groaning with marrows and tomatoes, and the altar obscured by harvest loaves and precariously balanced jars of jam. Today, our aim is to encircle the congregation with donations for the foodbank, and celebrate a very urban sort of harvest. Read More
Skins, pots, beads, gold, coins, camels, land, wine, stamps … throughout history and across the world communities have had different stores of value. The innovation of coinage created liquidity for barter economies, and the innovations of credit and fractional reserve banking have accelerated this liquidity to a froth. Stiglitz and others talk about economies as being reducible to information. Perhaps it helps to regard the universal store – the universal language – as value itself, as expressed through price. This abstracts from the material into the relative and, communicated through information flows, allows a more exact matching between supply and demand. Meanwhile, people have themselves become banks, living on fractional reserves, such that their lives become a house of cards, held up by trust, a trust in the faceless millions whose total actions sustain a securitised economy. Read More
