Author

Dr. Cynthia  Moe-Lobeda

Building a Moral Economy: Pathways for People of Courage

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

“What a feast of life…this remarkable, impressive, and timely volume.” - Upolu Lumā Vaai (Fiji)

“…A healing gift….brilliant…transformative and practical….The book brims with so much hope!” -  Athena Peralta (Switzerland and Philippines)

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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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.

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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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“Our decisions and actions will shape the fate of life on Earth. None before us have borne this moral weight. What we do matters! It is, therefore, a good time to be alive.”

Cynthia Moe-Lobeda

“Imagine a different relationship in which people and land are good medicine for each other.”


Robin Wall Kimmerer

Resources for Building a Moral Economy:

A Toolkit

See

  • Global Environmental Justice and Economic Life

    • Global Environmental Justice Documentaries https://gej.docuseek2.com/

    Curated collection of 48 documentaries, many of them excellent, with study guides. Capturing ecological, social, and public health crises, these documentaries bring the neglected stories of marginalized communities to light.  Real, relatable people [are] portrayed within their diverse cultures and everyday lives as they are impacted by pollution, globalization, climate change, civil war, ecosystem loss, and corporate power...


    • The Story of Stuff series.  https://www.storyofstuff.org/movies/

    Many excellent very short films including The Story of Stuff.


    • Plastic China. https://gej.docuseek2.com/gj-022a

    Plastic China’s main character, Yi-Jie, is an unschooled 11-year-old girl whose family works and lives in a typical plastic waste household-recycling workshop. This is her world. Plastic China reveals the unsafe conditions in which adults and children alike toil, as they seek to eke out a basic living by processing toxic plastic waste products that they know are polluting their rivers and lakes, contaminating the air that they breathe, and compromising their health in noticeably painful ways. The film exposes not only a disparity between Western lifestyles of consumption and those who deal with the concomitant waste, but also in the hierarchical structure of facility owners and the workers they employ for low compensation in unhealthy and sometimes abusive environments.

  • Indigenous Communities, Environmental Justice, and Economic Life

    If Not Us, Then Who series.  https://gej.docuseek2.com/gj-040a

    A series of seven brief films highlighting victories of Indigenous people in struggles for climate justice and other forms of environmental justice. We see Indigenous peoples’ will, strength, and determination in standing up for their homelands and communities in the face of corporations, oppressive government entities, and other threats. We witness the impact of the women’s movement on the women of the babassu forest, traditional teaching by the elders of the Sungai Utik people, and successes in reclaiming forests that are people’s homes. 


  • Economy, Climate Change, and Race

    • Cooked: Survival by Zip Code https://gej.docuseek2.com/gj-041a

    This 54 minutes film is the story of a severe example of environmental injustice. filmmaker Judith Helfand argues that there is an inextricable connection between environmental injustice and racism as she explores the impact of the 1995 Chicago heat wave that caused hundreds of deaths. 739 citizens of Chicago died in a heat wave in a single week, most of them poor, elderly, and African American.  An examination of this and similar disasters reveals structural inequalities that make poor communities and communities of color vulnerable to these events. The film questions existing policies that ignore these kinds of structural inequities that endanger and kill people who live in the “wrong” zip code. 

    • https://www.pbs.org/wnet/peril-and-promise/series/freedom-to-breathe/

    A series of brief films: Who has the Freedom to Breathe in the U.S.?  Those who live and work on the front-lines of climate change will tell you that climate change is affecting Americans’ well-being right now. The Nexus Media team  makes stops across the Southern and Southwestern United States from Albuquerque, New Mexico to Miami, Florida to see this firsthand. They reveal how climate change and fossil fuel pollution are impacting people’s day-to-day lives through health, housing, and the economy — just to name a few. This series highlights the intersection between climate change and the racial, social, and economic challenges we face — and the solutions that exist.


    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t97xwp-EUyY. 

    A short film produced by Climate Justice for All, a climate focused youth-led global campaign of the Methodist church worldwide. 


    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jY2eWJ-U_VQ

    A short film, “Climate Justice is Social Justice” by Earthrise.


    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHRu0VV-Dbw

    Excellent 10-minute introduction to climate justice on a global scale. 


  • Economy and Housing

    • “Renter Revolt: Housing and Human Rights in America’s Homeland.”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQWXQNbrVRg


    • “Sold Out: Affordable Housing at Risk.” https://www.pbs.org/show/sold-out-affordable-housing-risk/ 

    PBS documentary sharing tenant stories, and lifting up solutions to loss of affordable housing.


  • Food Justice

    Food Chains

  • Other

    • A House Divided https://americadividedseries.com/

  • Vision of What Is Possible

    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m8YACFJlMg&t=312s

    A hopeful visionary animated film about the new equitable ecological democratic economy that is possible. Produced by Intercept and Naomi Klein. Co-launched by: Via Campesina, Amazon Watch, NDN Collective, Movement for Black Lives, Greenpeace International, Haymarket Books, Sunrise Movement, and others.   (8 minutes)..

    Article about the film at: https://theintercept.com/2020/10/01/naomi-klein-message-from-future-covid/


  • Religion and Moral-spiritual Power for Economic Transformation

    • https://vimeo.com/110615115:   “Searching for Sacred Mountain”

    A 20-minute film. Journalist Liu Jianqiang and conservation biologist Lü Zhi discover a new way of looking at environmental conservation on the Tibetan Plateau, where Buddhist monks and villagers have preserved vast tracts of land for centuries. “Everyone has a responsibility to protect life,” Buddhist lama Tashi Sange says, “no matter if you are just born, or 80 years old.”


    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmP1C-4eLbI 

    Religious leaders in Africa condemning EACOP (the East Arica pipeline) ( 3.5 minutes)


Read

  • General Reading on Building Ecological, Equitable, Democratic Economic Life

    Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth

    Take Back the Economy by J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, and Stephen Healy

    Buddhist Economics by Clair Brown

    This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein

    The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee

    Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

    The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can by Stan cox

    Poverty by America by Matthew Desmond

    The True Cost of Low Prices by Vincent A. Gallagher 

    The Spirit of Soul Food: Race, Faith, and Food Justice  by Christopher Carter.,

    “The Carbon Majors Database: CDP Carbon Majors Report 2017” at https://tinyurl.com/2s3meeyy.


  • Fingers on the Hands of Healing Change: Build the New (Chapter 8)

    • Emily Kawano and Julie Matthaei. “System Change: A Basic Primer to the Solidarity Economy, in  Non-Profit News Nonprofit Quarterly. https://nonprofitquarterly.org/system-change-a-basic-primer-to-the-solidarity-economy/

  • Fingers on the Hands of Healing Change: Live Lightly (Chapter 9)

    • https://rebellion.global/blog/2022/09/07/climate-change-your-fault/

    An excellent article exploring the relationship of lifestyle change to systemic change (two of three terrains of change explored in this book series).

  • Fingers on the Hands of Healing Change: Change the Rules (Chapter 10)

    • https://peopleseconomy.org/about-the-toolkit/

    A toolkit and guide for public policy action for a new economy, produced by the New Economy Coalition.

  • Fingers on the Hands of Healing Change: Move the Money (Chapter 11)

    • Cooler Earth - Higher Benefits

    • IPCC AR6 Factsheet on Climate Finance

    • Aligning your banking with sustainability goals

    • How to switch to better banks and credit cards

    • Move Your Money: guide and campaign

    • UNEP FI: Catalyzing action across the financial system to support the transition to more sustainable and inclusive economies worldwide

    • “Invest Divest: A Decade of Progress Towards a Just  Climate Future” produced by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, Stand. Earth, C40, and the Wallace Global Fund.

    • Celia Bottger, Rachel Eckles, Bianca Hutner, Sarah Jacqz, Emily Thai, “The Reinvest Report” (Boston: The Solidarity Economy Initiative, 2018).

    • David Haslam, “The Bible and Tax” (Birmingham, UK: Methodist Tax Justice network, 2014).

    • “Zactax Toolkit,” produced by Council for World Mission, Lutheran World Federation, World Communion of Reformed Churches, World Council of Churches, World Methodist Council, 

    • Zactax Toolkit.

    • “Global Tax Justice – Key Actors and Key Aims” produced by the Methodist Tax Justice Network.

    • “Tax for the Common Good,” produced by Church Action for Tax Justice


  • Poetry related to Justice in Economic Life

    Banana by Paul Hlava Ceballos

  • Move the money

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/presbyterian-church-divest-from-fossil-fuel-companies-climate-concerns/

Meet

Explore

Excerpts from Building a Moral Economy

Digging Deeper 

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