A cool day in Nyack, with a clear view of the Hudson. The Tappan Zee is a strange straight line reaching into Westchester. Wyclef Jean sings in the background about being grateful, “stopped by the cops, but they didn’t find the Glock!” My current musical obsession. Today is for writing and reading. The ultimate luxury.

I want to write about consumerism. Ironic, I guess. I know as soon as I do, I’ll implicate myself, a very comfortable academic living in an idyllic town resting in the deep shadow of New York City. By “consumerism,” I mean what Veblen wrote about back in 1899 in his ground breaking work, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” “Consumerism is the equation of personal happiness with the purchase of material possessions and consumption.”

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Last week I was asked by a Christian magazine to put together one paragraph on “where I see hope. “ To be honest, I wasn’t feeling very hopeful at the time. About three years ago, my wife and I put $1000 into a fund for a twentieth anniversary trip. Where ever the fund ends up, that’s what we allocate for our trip. This would be fun! I was thinking Cruise. Maybe Bermuda? Sunny and warm. Sand would be involved. Food. We would return to the frozen northeast wonderfully tanned, vividly declaring our success with deep skin tones. Shamelessly wearing brightly colored short-sleeved shirts with shells on them. Ah, life.

Today that fund will take Ticia and me on a slow walk to downtown Nyack for a cheap sandwich and a can of diet coke. I think we’ll hold on to it until our twenty fifth. Hope?  Was that trip why I got out of bed in the morning? But I kept thinking about it. I work at a Christian college because I have hope in God’s desire to work in the lives of students. What about you? What gives you hope? If our hope was in the market, then our hope was misplaced. Politics? Roughly 50% of our country is about to be terribly disappointed. Perhaps this is a good time to clarify what makes us tick. Why do we get up in the morning? Like me, take a moment to check. If you have another minute, post it for others to read.

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David Brooks is one of my favorite Op-Ed writers for the New York Times. True, he can be a little hyper-conservative, but at least he’s hyper-conservative in the New York Times, which polls recently proved was not read by real Americans, just US citizens living in non-American places, like New York. So, it all balances out.

On Tuesday he wrote a column about the markets and behavior. As I read it, I kept thinking about the fall. I mean THE FALL. The red fruit on the tree fall, not the golden leaves on the ground fall. The event which disconnected us from God and, at the same time, from Reality. We moved into dark caves of self-centeredness, more connected to our own demanding selves than the hopes and needs of others. Our personal perspectives permanently skewed by a need to be in control.

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Some of us have a nutty Uncle in the family. The guy who does outlandish things, sometimes crossing the line between being an amusing eccentric and a dangerous embarrassment. I see that today in our Nation’s   “Uncle Sam.” He is a collective. A mirror image of all us, usually seems a little odd; he is never quite where we are. But in his defense, he can’t be more than the sum of our hopes and fears. We can make him out through the foggy window of the media, doddering around, picking up things he should not; a befuddled and bewildering presence in our world.

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SOP - in business it stands for Standard Operating Procedures - a routine way of completing a frequently occurring tasks. All businesses have them, even those who are too postmodern to identify them as such. (Can you imagine the guys at Google having notebooks full of documented processes? Neither can I - but I'm be wiling to bet there's a "right" and "wrong" way for completing most of their common organizational functions.) Regardless of identification, SOP's help organizations ensure consistency of results. They help eliminate the fluctuating nature of human performance by providing step-by-step instructions with little to no variance. They are what allow businesses to identify how they do business.  Although we all might not carry around a standard operating procedures notebook, most of us also have a set of practices that help us organize our life. They are our personal SOP's - the routines that we establish to ensure that we get the consistency of results that we desire. They are rarely perfect, and just like in business, they can not account for unforeseen environmental changes, but we rely on them to get everything that we need to done, and still have time for watching The Office.
However, society's SOP's have changed over time. I am reminded of this when I listen to Sugarland's latest song (for the non-country fans - Sugarland is a duo who's probably most famous for their leading singer recording a duet with Bon Jovi.) In a story of growing up and letting go, Sugarland traces the trajectory of a young girl's life. The final verse is about the end of her marriage - and concludes with her driving away from her now-estranged husband with nary a look in reverse.
The noteworthy part of this song is that the woman's disintegrating marriage is just another right of passage in the course of her life. Along with driving her first car and having her first crush, its just another step on the road. Perhaps its not quite to the point that leaving one's marital commitment is a standard operating procedure, but from the sound of the song, it's getting close.

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This article has some great thoughts on the passing of Paul Newman and the generation of socially-conscious businesses he inspired.

Judaism’s holiest season of repentance coincided with comeuppance for corporate America.   Ten days of reflection follow Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.  Yet Yom Kippur, the annual day of atonement, was observed everywhere but Wall Street.

Ten days of fasting and prayer sound utterly appropriate after an era of unregulated excess. Surely, the fat cat C.E.O.s who have been gorging themselves at stockholders expense could tighten their belts for at least one day.   Yet, the reports flowing from Wall Street revealed ongoing gluttony in a week of economic collapse.   The day of judgement is uponus.  But where is the atonement?   Why no public confession of sins?   Whither repentance? 

When spendthrift corporations like AIG should have been redecorating in sack cloth and ashes, these ingrates celebrated their federal bailout with a blowout at the St.

As the sky falls on Wall Street, are you confused about what happened? Not sure how this complicated chain events was started? Here's a few, interesting, and (dare I say?) entertaining resources that will help you become informed about what in the world is going on.

Written long before the crisis even began, Michael Lewis' book Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street is by far the most interesting explanation of how mortgage-backed securities were created on Wall Street in the 1980s. I read this book several years ago and it scared me - apparently, not without basis. (Lewis has a new book coming out in December, called Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity.)

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The Headlines are pouring in from around the world:  500 point market 'adustment' evaporates billions.  Major banking institutions melting down.  Government bails out major insurance company.  Global Economy.  Foreclosure crisis.  Consumer Debt.  Energy Consumption declines with economic downturn... etc. etc. 

"Yes, yes, all very interesting, author, but you're here to talk about spiritual things,  So please, a little Bible study?" Since you asked... here we go:

 James 5:1 tells us that we who are rich will have our own share of miseries so that, rather than rejoicing in our riches, perhaps we should acknowledge that they've come, perhaps, at the cost of unjust treatment for those who live elsewhere, far away, working for wages that fail to provide adequately.  

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All of us remember a time in which we were caught doing something that we know we shouldn't be doing. If you are like me, you also a remember a time when you someone caught you in the act and your response was anger mixed with embarassment. For me, it was the time that my youth pastor reprimanded me for having a less than genteel conversation that someone had reported to me. He caught me dead-to-rights, but instead of humbling acknowleding my error, I preceded to defend myself and get angry at whomever at turned me in. I should have let my guilt lead me to repentance but instead it led me to try to figure out who it could be and what I could do to fix it so that wouldn't happen again.

As any child with loving parents know, being disciplined for wrong actions that we knowingly committed is never enjoyable.