Today we associate money with the profane, and for good reason. If anything is sacred in this World, it is surely not money.

Money seems to be the enemy of our better instincts. Money seems to be the enemy of beauty, of every worthy social and political reform.

Money seems to be destroying the Earth, as we pillage the oceans, the forests, the soil, and every species to feed a greed that knows no end.

From at least the time that Jesus threw the money changers from the temple, we have sensed that there is something unholy about money.

When politicians seek money instead of the public good, we call them corrupt.

Adjectives like dirty and filthy naturally describe money. You can not serve God and Mammon.

At the same time, no one can deny that money has a mysterious, magical quality as well, the power to alter Human behavior and coordinate Human activity.

From ancient times thinkers have marveled at the ability of a mere mark to confer this power upon a disk of metal or a slip of paper.

Unfortunately, looking at the World, it is hard to avoid concluding that the magic of money is an evil magic.

If we are to make money into something sacred, nothing less than a wholesale revolution in money will suffice, a transformation of its essential nature.

It is not merely our attitudes about money that must change, as some self-help gurus would have us believe; rather, we will create new kinds of money that embody and reinforce changed attitudes.

Sacred Economics describes this new money and the new economy that will coalesce around it. It explores the metamorphosis in Human identity that is both a cause and a result of the transformation of money.

The changed attitudes go all the way to the core of what it is to be Human: they include our understanding of the purpose of life, humanity’s role on the planet, the relationship of the individual to the Human and natural community.

Even what it is to be an individual, a Self.