A Monks' Guide to the Recession

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The financial crisis has hit the Abbey of the Genesee, a Trappist monastery in Western New York, but the monks inside aren’t panicked like much of the rest of the country. Sales of their artisan bread has dropped steeply, and unemployed locals are looking  to the monastery for employment and help. The monks, however, aren’t too worried. “Society values short-term goals,” one of the monks, Dom John Eudes Bamberger, told America magazine. “The monastic life takes the long view.”

“If people are just looking to get past the recession, they are missing an opportunity,” according to Dom Eudes. This crisis is a moment for reflection, to get beyond the hyper-materialistic, short-term thinking that got people into this problem. “Recession, as a human phenomenon, is analogous to other crises that test one’s lifestyle,” Dom Eudies continued. “But that lifestyle, for many Americans, was never real.”

Source: America(excerpt available online)

Image by Daniel Tibi, licensed under Creative Commons.

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