Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2014
Summary
It was a clear, crisp autumnal morning in London, with just a hint of the previous night’s dampness still in the air as guests entered the crystalline edifice of Allen & Overy, an international law firm. Its offices were part of a gleaming new complex built over what had previously been one end of Spitalfield Market, a site that used to mark the boundary of the financial district and the beginning of the East End. We gathered for coffee, croissants, and fresh orange juice, all served by demure and identically dressed waiters and waitresses, on the top floor suite. From the glass-walled offices one could look out over the raggedy bustle of Commercial Street and Brick Lane and glimpse Canary Wharf, a citadel of steel and glass beyond the teeming jostle of Whitechapel and Stepney, areas long associated with poverty, congestion, and intense religious diversity. We were gathered for a meeting of the Council of Christians and Jews, an organization set up in 1942 to foster better relations between the two traditions in the midst of World War II. It was now November 25, 2009 and a very different world crisis was prevailing: the unquiet specters of capitalism – scarcity, fear, and instability – haunted the news cycle with the prospect of a second Great Depression and the potential collapse of the global banking system. The theme of the breakfast meeting was “Ethical Capitalism” and the presenters were Stephen Green, chair of the global bank HSBC and an ordained minister in the Church of England; Lord Levene, chair of Lloyds of London, former Lord Mayor of the City of London and a major figure in the British Jewish community; and Lord Paul Myners, the then Financial Services Secretary for the Labour government and aspirant theology student (earlier that year Lord Myners, a Methodist, declared that on retirement he intended to study theology). Like exorcists gathered at the bedside of the possessed, they put forth their remedies for the troubled souls of the financial markets and those that traded in them.
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- Resurrecting DemocracyFaith, Citizenship, and the Politics of a Common Life, pp. 1 - 18Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014