Building a Moral Economy

Ecological, Equitable, Democratic: Pathways for People of Courage

You Have The Power Today To Change Tomorrow

"This luminous book brims with the spirited moral care and scholarly brilliance that mark all of Cynthia Moe-Lobeda’s work. But Building a Moral Economy is her most personal, engaging, and capacious book - inviting readers to join the building of an already-emerging moral economy." - Gary Dorrien

“A tour de force….path-breaking and life-changing.” - Mary Evelyn Tucker

“Practical, embodied and faithful…a courageous guide filled with ideas, tools, and vision for the future of the planet.” - Raj Patel

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Praise for Building a Moral Economy

Athena Peralta

Cynthia Moe-Lobeda’s newest book is a healing gift for all who yearn and search for another model of meeting our socio-economic needs that does not come at the expense of other people’s rights and the health of our already beleaguered planet. Brilliant in holding together the community and the individual, the spiritual and the political, the transformative and the practical, Moe-Lobeda shines a light on stepping stones and paths towards economies that live out the divine call to love one’s neighbours and to care for creation. The book brims with so much hope!
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Rev. Adam Russell Taylor

Building a Moral Economy is both a prophetic call to reshape our collective economic life for the sake of saving the future of human life on our planet and a practical and profoundly hope-inspiring roadmap for how each of us can do our part to close the gap between the brokenness of the world as it is and the world as it should be. I would recommend Building a Moral Economy to anyone who wants to know what they can do today to bring a better world into being. 
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Raj Patel

Practical, embodied and faithful, Dr. Moe-Lobeda has written a courageous guide filled with ideas, tools, and vision for the future of the planet.
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Richard B. Norgaard

With morally muscled reason and touchingly brutal facts, Cynthia Moe-Lobeda lifts us to the joy of working together for personal, systemic, and consciousness transformation. Join others in, or strengthen your ties with, the liberating commitments of caring people (to build a moral economy) or (to replace our socially and environmentally destructive economy). With brutal facts, hope rousing stories, graceful reason, and moral imagination awakening, Dr. Moe-Lobeda gently lifts us above despair, denial, and do-nothing acceptance of our exploitive economy. Engage, or more deeply engage, in liberating commitment to the many social movements transforming lives, the system, and our consciousness of the sacred. We can live in mutually supportive harmony with each other and all life.
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Mary Evelyn Tucker

This book is a tour de force of careful economic research integrated with rich theological perspectives and ethical norms. It outlines the systemic problems we face of widespread injustice and inequity, while pointing toward viable solutions. Building a Moral Economy is path-breaking and life-changing.
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Larry Rasmussen

Economics has been famously called “the dismal science.” Who knew, then, that a book building a moral economy could be engaging, inviting, inspiring, constructive, pastoral, prophetic, therapeutic, and rich with stories? This one is, and it’s Moe-Lobeda’s finest writing and most important project to date.
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Kwok Pui-lan

Deeply personal and political, Building a Moral Community invites us to a sacred journey of communal healing for a world beset by the climate crisis, economic inequity, and global racism. It is a hope-filled book that motivates us to act by offering many practical examples of social change.
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Kim Stanley Robinson

What distinguishes this inspiring book is its insistence that our current civilization's crisis requires a range of actions that all cohere, and are a matter of whole sight, and a full integration of what we are used to thinking of as different categories of thought. Economic life as spiritual practice—this is Moe-Lobeda’s holistic vision, described here with clarity and grace.
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Catherine Keller

While nothing now materializes with more manipulative power than the global neoliberal economy—Moe Lobeda, almost impossibly, swoops us into the spiritual forcefield and  healing beauty of a live alternative. 
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Allan Aubrey Boesak

Every once in a while, a book comes along and one thinks: why has something so desperately needed taken so long? For just as we begin to think that everything about one of our greatest crises has already been written, too much talked about and too little done about, here is a book that takes away all the climate fatigue, all the silliness of the “what aboutisms,” all the jadedness of “We’ve heard it all,” all the frantic search for “something new.” Cynthia Moe-Lobeda’s wonderful book delivers everything it promises. Here is an invitation to the most intimate, and simultaneously most public and practical spirituality, to a collective yet intensely personal journey to a new beginning, an inspired and inspirational way of living that spans the generations. Honest, open, and entirely persuasive because it is so entirely authentic. It embraces us all with a gentle, and utterly irresistible inclusiveness, draws us into the book only to release us into the making of a different world. Seldom have I felt so fulfilled after reading a book, and I know why: this book was not simply written – it was birthed.
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Pamela Haines

Cynthia Moe-Lobeda offers a clear-eyed, open-hearted and Spirit-filled invitation to envision and work toward economies that are ecological, equitable, democratic—and moral. The journey she invites us on, toward the healing of a diseased economy and all its ways of life that violate our deeply held values, is a journey of freedom and communion. In it is a sacred invitation to find the joy of putting our precious human gifts to use for the sake of our future. 
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Betsy Leondar-Wright

Cynthia Moe-Lobeda welcomes us, her readers, into a personal conversation about despair and hope, drawing us close with her own honest voice. This poetic volume resonates with emotional intelligence about readers' feelings about extreme inequality and the accelerating climate crisis, and offers prompts for reflection and action. It's an enlivening and empowering read, joyfully offering stories and voices of people of many faiths and nations who are carrying out varied efforts for planetary healing. If our society turns a corner towards healthy, life-affirming systems, this kind of interwoven calls to personal growth, moral challenge, narrative transformation, and collective action for structural change will have been among the catalysts that brought us there.
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Rev Professor Dr Upolu Lumā Vaai

What a feast of life…this remarkable, impressive, and timely volume….In this disruptive yet inspiring volume, Dr Moe-Lobeda speaks as a wayfinder for the global voyaging community and a voice of wisdom in the rough seas of the Anthropocene. To hold the voyaging canoe on course, the wayfinder points the way to a systematic rebuilding of equitable, ecological, and democratic economies. Slowly. Evenly. Without rushing into the future. For the sake of healing and restoration, the wayfinder pleads for the voyaging community to collectively raise the navigating sails of right relationships, neighborly spiritualities, and justice-seeking love, guided by the winds of Spirit, if its goal is to find a life-affirming economic route to the island of hope. Highly recommended!
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Liz Theoharis

We can live in a world where everyone flourishes; it is what God intends. This life-affirming vision is at the heart of Cynthia Moe-Lobeda's book. Read this book if you find abandonment amid abundance and poverty amid plenty as immoral and wrong, and to find a path that affirms that ending poverty is possible; indeed, it is what our God of justice demands.
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Kathryn Tanner

Moe-Lobeda does a wonderful job laying out both the big picture and the small, practical steps on the way towards a spiritually-informed new economy. Drawing the reader through her own beautifully written expressions of beauty, joy, and clear-eyed hope, she helps us recognize uncomfortable truths about the current environmental crisis while providing uplifting and empowering tools and resources to move us along together in a healing journey towards a better, more life-giving future for the whole Earth.
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Ryan P. Cumming

There is no shortage of books on the climate crisis or the economy. Few, however, so deftly weave robust analysis within an invitation to be part of an unfolding story of hope, courage, and justice in a world that sorely needs all three. Moe-Lobeda’s book is both a challenge to us to consider the real environmental, social, economic, and human costs of “normal” behaviors and an inspiration to imagination and creativity. Her writing glides between the deeply personal story of her own journey as a scholar-activist and penetrating critique of economies that extract far more from our environment and lives than just tangible resources. Moe-Lobeda looks to art, religion, and social movements to find liberative “fragments” (ala David Tracy) that ground renewed hope, connect spirituality to socio-economic activity, and invite readers to forge new “pathways for people of courage.” Moe-Lobeda’s book is an engaging, challenging, accessible start to what should be a highly anticipated series.
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Rev. dr. abby mohaupt

We people of faith need this book as a tender and brave reminder that there's still much for us to do to work for a more just world. Cynthia Moe-Lobeda's words invite us to dig into ourselves and then act in courageous nieghborly-love. Read this book if you are ready to listen to your own heart and faith and then take bold action.
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Gerald O. West

The persuasive summons of this book is felt, first, in the inclusive and conversational manner through which Cynthia Moe-Lobeda makes her argument, and then, second, in the slow gathering of resources and voices that provide a distinctive praxis with which to re-envision economic life as a spiritual practice. Invoking the insightful recognition that diverse injustices are forms of disease which require healing, Moe-Lobeda conceptualises a restructuring of economic systems to foster belonging instead of exploitation. Throughout this remarkably relational book the reader is directly addressed and offered creative ways of participating in the collaborative journey of personal and systemic healing required for a moral economy, as we work together in solidarity for change through resistance and rebuilding. We are summoned to delve into and discern within our faith traditions those redemptive resources with which to struggle for ecological and equitable ways of structuring local and global economic life.
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Marjorie Kelly

Cynthia Moe-Lobeda offers a healing and hopeful message of economic life as spiritual practice, inviting us into a “sacred and healing journey to new ways of being human together.” This is a blessing of a book.
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Rev. Rebecca Barnes

Communities of faith—and all individuals longing to live out a spiritual, moral or ethical calling to create a better world—should read this book! This is a beautifully crafted testament to the joy, hope and real possibility that people standing together with one another and the earth will create a future where all are cared for and none left to suffer alone. In these pages, we are en-couraged that we can honestly and courageously face the harm we have done and decide to switch direction, like a beautifully coordinated flock of birds (one of the many powerful images Moe-Lobeda uses). Moe-Lobeda's wisdom, personal stories, and practical suggestions help us to first envision and then embody relational, empowering, caring economies that will be for the healing of all.
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Rev. Dr. Kuzipa Nalwamba

Lobeda refreshingly and boldly juxtaposes a detailed critical appraisal of death-dealing economies based on exploitation and extraction, with a clearly defined constructive proposal of a moral economy built on ‘spiritual practices of awe, lament, holy anger and gratitude'.  Replete with concrete examples of companions who are already on this sacred journey, this book is as contextually rooted as it is morally empowering and as conceptually nuanced as it is theologically accountable, firmly rooted in God's cosmic love.
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Bill McKibben

Really loving one's neighbors—and constantly expanding the definition of who that neighbor is—will turn out to be the crucial practice of our overheated century, as these profound meditations make clear.
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Athena Peralta

Cynthia Moe-Lobeda’s newest book is a healing gift for all who yearn and search for another model of meeting our socio-economic needs that does not come at the expense of other people’s rights and the health of our already beleaguered planet. Brilliant in holding together the community and the individual, the spiritual and the political, the transformative and the practical, Moe-Lobeda shines a light on stepping stones and paths towards economies that live out the divine call to love one’s neighbours and to care for creation. The book brims with so much hope!
Read More

Rev. Adam Russell Taylor

Building a Moral Economy is both a prophetic call to reshape our collective economic life for the sake of saving the future of human life on our planet and a practical and profoundly hope-inspiring roadmap for how each of us can do our part to close the gap between the brokenness of the world as it is and the world as it should be. I would recommend Building a Moral Economy to anyone who wants to know what they can do today to bring a better world into being. 
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Creative courageous people the world over  from all walks of life – herald a new vision for economic life together! Economies that enable all people to have the necessities for life with dignity, and Earth’s web of life to flourish. Join them!

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The Building a Moral Economy series invites you into a sacred journey, a journey to heal our economies.

  • Explore economies as webs of relationship, economic life as spiritual practice, food water and housing as human rights.
  • Glimpse pathways toward a future where Earth’s climate once again supports life abundant.

Trailer Of Book

Trailer created by undergraduate class in television production at California Lutheran University: Joshua Casanova, Amaya Charles, Andrew Johnson, Victoria Peterson, Abbey Saucedo, Lillian Schmidt, Kara Zaccaro. Led by Professor David Grannis. Music by Kara Zaccaro. Voiceover by Maggie Stenson.

"Deeply personal and political, Building a Moral Community invites us to a sacred journey of communal healing for a world beset by the climate crisis, economic inequity, and global racism. It is a hope-filled book that motivates us to act by offering many practical examples of social change."

Kwok Pui-lan, author of Postcolonial Politics and Theology: Unraveling Empire for the Global World

“Beautifully written expressions of beauty, joy, and clear-eyed hope…uplifting and empowering tools to move us along together in a healing journey towards a…more life-giving future for the whole Earth.”

Kathryn Tanner, Frederick Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology, Yale Divinity School, and author of Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism

Pathways for People of Courage

Economies shape life and death, determine who will have water, food, housing, health. Economies foment climate disaster or climate healing. Equitable, ecological,  democratic economies open doors to racial justice.  With these hope-filled and honest books, you will explore pathways for transforming extractive exploitative economies into economies for life —pathways for people of courage.

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You have the power to dream, to forge a future of justice and ecological wholeness for our children and ourselves.

This series equips people for building more ecological, equitable, and democratic forms of economic life. The books defy the idea that exploitative economies are inevitable and unchangable. Readers may explore the role of spirituality and religion in building more socially just, ecologically sane, and democratic economies.

Avoiding the most dire damages of climate change “requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has ‘no documented historic precedent.’”

Coral Davenport citing an IPCC report

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