Peter L. Steinke, author of Healthy Congregations: A Systems Approach has written the foreword for Just a Little Bit More: The Culture of Excess and the Fate of the Common Good.

Writing on behalf of the common good, the author asks how the American economy can benefit all, not a few. As currently structured, it can’t. T. Carlos Anderson argues for an egalitarian approach to fiscal matters.

Deftly, he sets the historical scene of how the economy took the form of religion. Money is the new god, actually, the old god in new design. For a god is that in which you put your trust. By tracing the development of the economy from the land of opportunity to the summum bonum, the reader gets a perspective as to why we are in the present quagmire.

The new religion comes with priests and bishops known as bankers and investors. The free market evangelists boast of the invisible hand that guides the system. There are even rogue angels like Bernie Madoff and other Ponzi schemers. With money as god, financial worth determines worthiness. Money is no longer “the root of all evil” but the essence of the good life. Excess is the sign of cosmic blessing.

Years ago, psychologist Erich Fromm noted that “greed is a bottomless pit,” an apt image for hell. Greed “exhausts the person in an endless attempt to satisfy need,” but Fromm contends that the need is insatiable, leading to addictive behavior and the selling of one’s soul.

Anderson knows that money talks, but it is a one way conversant. He wants economic democracy to be the new standard to define a system that has lost a sense of proportion.

The reader will benefit immensely in seeing how we have shaped the system we are part of and what can lead to a new way of doing economics that embraces the common good.

From the foreword of Just a Little Bit More: The Culture of Excess and the Fate of the Common Good, Blue Ocotillo Publishing (2014). All rights reserved. Paperback edition available May 1 from this website.