Friday, January 29, 2010

Archbishop of Canterbury says world is a 'broken society'


From The London Telegraph-

Giving a lesson at Trinity Wall Street Episcopal Church in New York, Dr Rowan Williams attacked what he called the "straw man" of self-interest and the way in which rich countries disregarded poor ones.

He said: "Do we live in a broken society? Well, in many ways we live in a society where far too many people live deeply fragmented lives even if they are materially well off.

"We live in a world that's broken in the sense that a very large part of our world, notably Africa, feels, with a good deal of justification, that the rest of the world has more or less stopped thinking about it."

Framing global relationships in financial terms, he said: "In a sense that is brokenness, where one sector of the human family says, 'We don't believe that the rest of you have any investment in what happens to us.' That's real brokenness."

Dr Williams also attacked the "uncritical" way that banks had sold expensive mortgages to those who could least afford it, and packaged them up into opaque financial products.
Bankers had invented "more and more recondite metaphysical, unreal forms of wealth generation" simply to "produce noughts on the end of the balance sheet", according to The Times.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/7099321/Archbishop-of-Canterbury-says-world-is-a-broken-society.html

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