Why am I passionate about this?
My plan to write my book clicked after I bought an apple grown in New Zealand, 10,000 miles away from my home in Ohio. How did it make sense that we could buy apples so cheaply from so far away? What was the carbon footprint of that one transaction? Growing up in Michigan in the 1970s and 1980s, I had seen our industrial cities decay as trade globalized. Later I watched with horror as global financial markets crashed in 2008. With these experiences in mind, I wanted to write about both the benefits and the costs of globalization—and about its ethics—for religious communities like mine. So I did.
Scott's book list on the religious ethics of globalization
Why did Scott love this book?
Professor Peters was my first and foremost guide when it came to framing the ethics of globalization from within my own religious perspective.
She helped all of us later writers by mapping the academic terrain, describing two dominant theories of globalization and two resistance theories. The two dominant theories are neoliberalism (as exemplified by Thomas Friedman) and reformist social development (as exemplified by John Maynard Keynes), while the two resistance theories stem from ecological and postcolonial perspectives.
She evaluates all four theories according to how they contribute (or don’t) to human flourishing. While I don’t always agree with her conclusions, she is asking the right questions and applying them to the most important perspectives on globalization.
1 author picked In Search of the Good Life as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Rebecca Todd Peters provides a helpful overview of the complicated contemporary debates about globalization. By engaging in a careful reading of the cacophony of views on the subject, she unearths four identifiable positions within these debates, each offering a different moral vision of the world. As she observes, policy debates about the direction in which globalization should move are morally serious debates about what values humanity will choose as most significant in the post-Cold War world. In Search of the Good Life argues that our moral task is to ensure that globalization proceeds in ways that honour creation and life,…
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