New Global Love Economy

I'm reading a book at the moment where the author ponders the metaphors Jesus would use if he lived in this day and age. I found the following to be very insightful and descriptive of the challenges we face in our world today:

Jesus might confront the global prosperity crisis by announcing the new global love economy...Our current prosperity system, as we shall see, is amazingly powerful - growing more so every day - yet it is unsustainable long-term, an example of self-delusion and denial about our creaturely limits that may be on of the most striking characteristics of modern times...

Socially, in this economy we consume time and produce fatigue, consume art and talent and produce entertainment and amusement, consume work and leisure and produce paychecks and heart attacks. And ultimately we consume communities and produce extended families, consume extended families and produce nuclear families, consume nuclear families and produce individuals, consume individuals and produce consumers, and finally consume consumers themselves and produce disembodied fragments called "wants" and "needs" and "markets" and "segments" and "anxieties" and "drives" that the economy consumes and excretes and reconsumes in a kind of cannibalistic ferment or rot. In the process, we commonly produce successful megaconsumers of unimaginable wealth who are more or less bankrupt in compassion for their poor neighbors. And in a stroke of suicidal genius, we simultaneously produce poor people whose greatest dream is to be like those megaconsumers who don't care at all about them.

That's why if Jesus were here today, I imagine he would speak frequently of the new global love economy of God - not an industrial economy, and not an information economy, and not even an experience economy, but a wise relational economy that measures success in terms of gross national affection and global community, that seeks to amass the appreciating capital of wise judgment, profound forethought, and deepening virtue for the sake of rich relationships. (Everything Must Change, p. 130-131)

The author is not asking us to remove ourselves from the reality of the world in which we live, and live in some "pie in the sky" place of religious irrelevance. Rather, I think he is encouraging us to engage the world in the most relevant of ways. In ways that truly reflect the reality of the God's kingdom and His heart for humanity.