September 17th 2023: Our Value Personae

Our Value Personae: A New Take on VisionWorks and Us
VisionWorks 2021 says a lot about who we are as a congregation. But what does it tell us about the decisions that we make in our daily lives?
It articulates what we do, but what does it tell us about why?  
This Sunday, we invited thought-leader Andrew Welch to share his answers to those questions, using a unique human value systems framework. The result is a perspective that promises to be thought-provoking and a challenge to our perceptions.
 Meet Andrew Welch
Andrew is a popular and engaging speaker on human values, ecological economics, and the true nature of current societal systems.  He consistently presents a fresh take on his material, making complex ideas accessible to any audience.  
His first book, “The Value Crisis”, was described by Alternatives Journal as “Dizzyingly well researched” and “a great reference on the in and outs of economics, politics, finance and the human condition.”  
The sequel, “Our Second Chance”, was published in February 2022.
 

First Reading

We live in an Age of Separation.  One by one, our bonds to community, nature, and place have dissolved, marooning us in an alien world.  The loss of these bonds is more than a reduction of our wealth, it is a reduction of our very being.  The impoverishment we feel, cut off from community and cut off from nature, is an impoverishment of our souls.  That is because, contrary to the assumptions of economics, biology, political philosophy, psychology, and institutional religion, we are not in essence separate beings having relationships.  We are relationship. 

 –  Charles Eisenstein , Sacred Economics

Second Reading

Education must seek to develop the needed sense of community – the feeling that, at some point, the special interest, even if it is yours, must give way to the general interest; that what best serves all best serves you.  With this must go a shrewd awareness that those who resist the general interest must themselves be resisted.  When corporations, trade associations, generals, bureaucrats, trade unions, lawyers, physicians, professors put their own pecuniary or bureaucratic interest ahead of the public interest, people must sense, react and oppose.

– John Kenneth Galbraith