St. Maximos' Hut

Robert raises an interesting point about economic success as a distraction from our spiritual lives. I don’t think markets fail because humans make bad choices. We’re presented with a fairly clear set of instructions about how to live from Scripture, church tradition, the writings of the fathers, and so forth. We can’t blame the distractions offered by the world, distractions made different by the abundance markets make possible. There were different distractions 1000 or 500 years ago – when infant mortality was so high that historians debate whether parents deliberately distanced themselves from their young children in recognition of the likelihood of the death of substantial proportion of them, when disease cut lives far shorter than we enjoy today. Robert is absolutely right that we face a lot of distractions from our spiritual lives as a result of the success of our economy. But I’ll take our modern distractions over the kind of distractions Christians faced in 1000 or 1500 or 1700.