On The Economic and The Ecumenical: It Takes All of Us to Tango

Art history and Elizabethan poetry don’t employ workers; the arduous and tedious application of business sciences  such a computer programming and accounting does.

Edward Conard, former managing director of Bain Capital, LLC,   Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Ever Been Told about the Economy is Wrong, Portfolio/Penguin, 2012

June 4, 2012 -  While I agree in the main with Edward Conard’s thesis that business savvy would be good for economic growth,  I disagree with the spirit of his comment about Elizabethan poetry.

My son, Spencer Reece, spent a year studying Elizabethan poetry at York University in England.   Spencer , now a nationally known poet and an Episcopal priest, was just awarded a Fullbright scholarship to highlight the plight of orphan girl in Honduras,  to raise money for  the Little Roses Orphanage in Honduras, and to write and translate a book on Honduran poets.   Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux will publish Spencer’s new book , The Upper Room, in 2014.

It was an Elizabethan poet and clergyman, John Donne (1572-1631), who wrote those famous lines.

No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is part of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if the manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes thee. Because I am involved in mankind and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Similarly it is impossible to separate economic from health concerns; to separate  costs of health care from their effect on the economy;   to separate economic growth from spiritual growth.  We are all involved in mankind, and the bell tolls for all of us.