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Jesus and the Roman Coin

I think I was a teenager when I first came across the story of Jesus’ clever back-and-forth with the religious authorities of his time. The story is found in Matthew 22:15-22, and the line familiar to most is in verse 21: “Then he said to them, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”  At the time, and in recent memory, I   [Read More …]

Racial Equity Statement

Faith and Money Network’s Commitment to Racial Equity "You can’t have capitalism without racism."  - Malcolm X For hundreds of years, laws, policies, and practices have perpetuated white supremacy – delivering excessive privilege to whites while disadvantaging Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities and precipitating the inequities of today. Since our founding, Faith and Money   [Read More …]

What practicing Sabbath Economics looks like for my family

The Kingdom of God is a beautiful place — kind of like my backyard in the Upper Eno Watershed in North Carolina: lush, green, a riot of color where birds are singing happy songs and splashing in the bird bath. In this place, every living creature has enough. No one is poor or in need. There is abundance, not scarcity. This is a pipe dream, you might say, but this is the world God provides for us,   [Read More …]

Introduction to Sabbath Economics

Event Date: October 15, 2021

Join activist-theologian Ched Myers and economist and author Susan Taylor for Introduction to Sabbath Economics, a virtual, two-part and two-day event on October 15 and 16, 2021. This online workshop will cover the basics of Sabbath Economics as a set of practices grounded in the biblical economic values of rest, jubilee, forgiveness, redistribution, and abundance. At the   [Read More …]

Investing, Giving Locally, and Becoming Big Budget Nerds: How One D.C. Couple is Figuring Out Their Finances, Together

Danny Mortensen and Liz Schmitt are a thirty-something couple residing in Washington, D.C., where they attend Capitol Hill United Methodist Church. Schmitt grew up in upstate New York and has lived in D.C. since 2009. She’s a self-proclaimed budget nerd who is working on investing locally. Outside of her day job in environmental policy, she has been getting back into teaching piano and enjoys good   [Read More …]

Why we decided to “purchase” a charitable gift annuity

This year my husband and I “purchased” a charitable gift annuity from the American Friends Service Committee with a significant portion of our assets. I call it a purchase, because we will receive a quarterly payment and they will manage and invest the funds, so we are getting something in return— even though the funds we used will stay with AFSC after we die.  There are different names   [Read More …]

More than enough: Cultivating a ‘mindset of abundance’

This past January, I enrolled in Faith and Money Network’s online study group, “Money, Faith and You.’ Each week we had homework, and for the second week, we were asked to write a money autobiography. I have used money autobiographies in my work at Everence (a faith-based financial services organization) so I was very familiar with the concept. A money autobiography invites you to think back to   [Read More …]

Are you a generous person?

Are you a generous person? In my work with people, I am often asked questions by people who want to gauge their own generosity. These are usually indirect queries like, “what are other people giving?” or “what percentage of income is the average amount?” rather than “Am I a stingy or profligate person?” This is a natural inclination to fulfill what is expected; to not give too little nor too much   [Read More …]

Trusting into deeper generosity — reflecting on a lifetime of lessons

Way back in the early 1990s I attended what was called a “Basic Retreat” with the then-named Ministry of Money, now Faith and Money Network.  I was newly single with three young kids and truly questioning my values around money. I had more money than most of my divorced friends who also were raising kids, and I felt a bit guilty. I wanted to be generous without being foolhardy. “How much   [Read More …]

Loaves, fishes and the work of building a world where everyone has enough

Most of us, whether we are conscious of it or not, operate somewhere on the continuum between an assumption of abundance and an assumption of scarcity. An assumption of abundance is a way of living with a healthy amount of trust that everything we truly need to become the people we were created to be will somehow be given.  It’s a way of living with trust that everything that happens to us   [Read More …]