Jan/Feb 2002

ARTICLE TOOLS

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For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. —1 Timothy 6:10, NIV

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest. —Adam Smith

I'm not in it for the money. —Commonly overheard saying in Silicon Valley

Last year in his Human Follies column for New York Press, Rutgers anthropologist Lionel Tiger remarked on the tragic deaths of missionary Roni Bowers and her baby daughter Charity over the skies of Peru. With many others, Tiger raised the question of why the Peruvian drug interdiction plane felt it necessary to open fire on a planeload of teetotalers. Had he stopped there, the column would have been a well-crafted if readily forgettable effort. But after the pro forma lament of pointless death, Tiger segued into an anti-missionary polemic. He railed against the "extraordinary vanity and presumption. … of missionaries" who "disrupt the most fundamental ideals and values of the people on whom they inflict themselves." These "frank imperialists," he said, "enjoy a fuzzy kind of permission to conduct a kind of business that is largely impossible in other less ethereal spheres of life."1

A torrent of outrage, from all around the world, rose in response. Linked to by hundreds of websites, including the vaunted Arts & Letters Daily, a column in a free Manhattan weekly that might have drawn a few angry letters instead drew buckets full. Some of the reported postmarks: Birmingham, AL, Fremont, CA, Edgewood, KY, Toronto, Johannesburg, and Papua New Guinea. Is this the sort of thing people have in mind when they talk about "globilization"?

Well, yes and no. In the prologue to Globalization and the Kingdom of God, Duke University's James ...