Thursday 28 April 2011

Interpretation 65, 2 (April 2011) on Usury


The latest issue of Interpretation is devoted to the topic of usury, with the following main articles:


Mark E. Biddle

The Biblical Prohibition Against Usury

A full consideration of social and economic justice would involve economics, sociology, political science, and legal theory, in addition to questions related to biblical hermeneutics and biblical ethics. This article addresses what must be the fundamental question for any Christian approach: what does the Bible say?


M. Douglas Meeks

The Peril of Usury in the Christian Tradition

Through the sixteenth century, the Christian tradition upheld the biblical denunciation of usury as the oppression of the poor and the neighbor. The church should critically retrieve this understanding as a contribution to the public discourse about the oppressive use of interest and debt in the current worldwide fiscal crises.


Mark Valeri

The Christianization of Usury in Early Modern Europe

The beginnings of Europe’s commercial revolution forced reconsiderations of the use of credit in long-distance trade. Protestant moralists in the early seventeenth century developed rationalizations for usury as a concerted effort to protect the Protestant regimes’ interest in the context of imperial warfare and colonial settlement. By the end of the seventeenth century, these moralists had made modern, market-oriented conceptions of usury commonplace in the Christian West.


Rebecca Todd Peters

Examining the Economic Crisis as a Crisis of Values

This article focuses on the ways in which the problem of predatory lending, or usury, allows us to examine our most basic Christian values and principles and think about how they might serve as a moral foundation for reshaping our economic structures and transactions.


David Brat

God and Advanced Mammon

This article looks at the economic and theological intersections of definitions of usury in the economic system of capitalism. It challenges seminarians and the church to examine their roles in addressing the problem of usury.

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