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Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street

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I began reading Jim Wallis when I was in seminary, and of all his books, my favorite is his book The Call to Conversion , which I consider to be a classic moral text for American Christianity. I've also enjoyed the lesser known Faith Works, but I found two of his recent books to be too much about politics and not enough vintage Jim Wallis.

But his newest book, Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street , is a return to the themes and to the fire of his classical period of fighting for American Christians to cut back and help the poor and to take stock of how we live. This is the most personal of his books -- the stories about his two boys and baseball and their night time prayers are priceless. It is also the most generous and pastorally sensitive. (Never mind that one of my (our) North Park students, Tim King, got to write The Epilogue.)

This books calls America, and Christians in America, to ask not "How can we recover our economy?" or "How can we get back to way things were?", but to ask "How can this economic crisis change us?" and "What can communities of faith do about it?" Wallis fears that we want to go back to the way things were, but the way things were got built on sandy foundations and reckless speculation and spending. Instead, in this book he calls us back to the values that can make a society strong and a church a witness to God's justice and peace.

Like Tim Keller, Wallis thinks the decades leading up to our economic crisis were rooted in idolatry, where greed was good, where it was all about me, and where the idea of "I want it now" ruled the day. Instead, we need to begin to see when enough is enough, that we're all in this together, and that we need to think of what life here will be like seven generations from now (as American Indians did).

So, Wallis probes ideas that can make a difference, like recommitting ourselves to family cultures and to the deeper meaning of work.

This book closes with twenty moral exercises, including the idea that calendars and family budgets are moral documents and that we need to measure our "screen" time over against our family time. The book returns to one of Jim's earliest themes: the value of simplicity in life.

This is Jim Wallis at his best, now softened and measured by his family life. I've become a fan of Jim Wallis again.

There is perhaps no more relatable ethicist in America than Jim Wallis. His common sense approach and easy to read prose get across points that would either be overcomplicated or fall flat in less adept hands. With "Rediscovering Values" Wallis aptly points out that the financial crisis was, in a broader sense, a moral crisis. As people have increasingly put their faith in the markets they abrogated any sense of responsibility to ensure their investments were indeed in capable hands. The increasingly higher returns lulled investors into a false sense of security which ultimately led to the calamitous collapse of the markets. And as with his earlier books Wallis does not let readers off easy, and instead argues that each individual has an obligation to renew their own sense of ethics and morality rather than assuming others will act in such a manner. But Wallis views this as an opportunity, or a teachable moment, rather than acting as a scold. The result is a book that is challenging, yet also invigorating. Wallis is preaching not just to individuals, but to society and specific businesses and leaders as well. What makes our society great is that we have an unspoken and unwritten contract between us all to act in an ethical and moral manner. Failing to do so will result in condemnation in the marketplace; something currently unfolding throughout our economy as we speak. Fail to act in an ethical and moral way and not only will your business face the consequences, but your career will as well; something aptly pointed out by all the out-of-work investment bankers.

And rather than being an anti-business screed, "Rediscovering Values" lays out a number of principles for people to follow to set themselves on the right financial path going forward. These are all common themes in his other bookssuch as God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America, and Faith Works: How to Live Your Beliefs and Ignite Positive Social Change, but a nice reminder for someone picking up one of his books for the first time. Admittedly, Wallis will not appeal to "Prosperity Gospel" Christians, but he will appeal to "Social Activist" Christians to the left. In the end that may minimize the audience that Wallis reaches, but hopefully people will keep an open mind and a discerning heart as they read.

I've been reading Jim Wallis's writings for the past few years now on the Sojourners blog, but this is the first book I've purchased of his. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, "To be great is to be misunderstood." When I Google Jim Wallis I notice that his critics all but accuse him of being a member of the communist party. These same critics are the ones that seem to think that if you don't believe the market should run everything, then you must be a Marxist!

I think that Rediscovering Values can go a long way to silence Wallis's critics if they would just give him a listening ear. Jim Wallis is not saying that he favors a centrally planned economy over a market economy. Neither is he trying to replace capitalism with socialism....or any other "ism." What Wallis is saying is that the private sector, the public sector, and the civic sector should all serve as a system of checks and balances against the other, and neither can function properly without a moral compass that looks out for the common good of all.

Very well written and highly recommended!

"The economic crisis presents us with an enormous opportunity: to rediscover our values - as people, families, as communities of faith, and as a nation." So begins Jim Wallis' newest book, which issues a rally cry to embrace a "transformational moment" in the history of America. Wallis does this by identifying how we got here, what we got ourselves into, and the way out.

Although I don't agree with every point Wallis makes, he has challenged me to rediscover the core values of my faith and respond. For example, as I try to live as a Good Samaritan, I was challenged to remember that "The gospel story of the Good Samaritan teaches an age old lesson that we must reach out to other human beings in order to be human ourselves and that we will likely have to cross some traditional social boundaries to do that."

Readers of the book will see how they can use this transformational moment to regain balance by remembering that enough is enough, that we're in it together, and that our aim must be to "develop an ethic of a sustainable economy and sustainable communities and to teach that ethic to our children."

Mr Wallis puts a new face on christian principles. He decries the greed that put us in our current economic difficulties and maps a path back to the people oriented business ethic. A must read for those of us that are put off by the right wing politics of the evangelical movement. May the real God bless America.

Jim Wallis has hit the nail on the head. We have indeed been asking the wrong questions, such as "When will this economic crisis be over?" Or "When can we get back to narmal?" It would be a serious mistake to try to get back to what we have thought of as normal in our economy. It is a matter of values that need to be rediscovered, values on which our nation was founded. The right question to ask is, "How can this crisis bring us to a 'new normal?'" This means that, as Wallis states in his Introduction, "We need a new normal, and this economic crisis is an invitation to discover what that means." Wallis deals in detail with a number of specific principles on which our country, our Congress, and our people need to focus. The book is thought provocing and ideal for small group discussion. A must read!

This is the best book by Wallis I have read. He offers a fresh perspective on a national crisis I didn't think I could do anything about even though I felt victimized and angry by it. Not only does Wallis suggest the Nation view the crisis from a perspective asking "How will this crisis change us?" but he admonishes us not to try to go back to the "normal," "to the way things use to be".

The book also helped me revisit my own perspective on 95 weeks of unemployment from one of anxiety and anger to one of pondering and prayer.

Jim Wallis points out that the financial crisis was a result of a loss of balance in our values and priorities. The worship of markets led to an overemphasis on only one aspect of what is important. He correctly calls for more commitment to the common good, as a necessary precondition for repairing the economy. Civil society must become more important than large corporations. Required reading for all politicians, and others.

This is a must read for anyone who wants some clarity and guidance into what is otherwise a confusing nightmare of economic and corporate mis-information. A no-nonsense, thought provoking, get back-to-basic values road map.

One comes to expect a survey of issues with good examples when you turn to Jim Wallis and he does not disappoint. Wallis approaches the key struggles of a capitalist society gone a muck in its banking, salaries etc. lifting some of the actions that disturb many of us today. He draws from the Abrahamic faiths to address these. While he is clever as ever in his language to describe these issues, I found his solutions short in two ways.
1)There is deeper need to analysis all factors at issue.
2)Our society is not that fixed to Abrahamic values. Many do not hold to the strength of these. One wishes to look at values in a relativistic society in a broader framework.
Still it is a troubling book needed to be read by leaders today.