Sublime

Lewis Hyde portrays gift economies in general: “The only essential is this: the gift must always move”—that is, people must keep passing it on. To treat a gift correctly is thus to “allow [ourselves] to become a channel for its current.”34

Give whatever you have been blessed with.

Productivity comes first from character, not techniques.

A few of the conditions that Benkler identifies as necessary to pull off commons-based peer production are intrinsic motivation, modular and granular tasks, and low coordination costs.

The necessaries of life for man in this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a prospect of success.

the distortions of something good must not cause us to think that the thing itself is evil. Employer/employee relationships, in themselves, are not morally neutral but are fundamentally good and pleasing to God because they provide many opportunities to imitate God’s character and so glorify him.

When the church becomes a place of brokerage rather than an organic community, she ceases to be alive. She ceases to be something we are, the living bride of Christ. The church becomes a distribution center, a place where the poor come to get stuff and the rich come to dump stuff. Both go away satisfied (the rich feel good, the poor get clothed and

The lesson is clear: work is a duty. However, it was still in a limited sense. We see this articulated by 13th-century Catholic priest Thomas Aquinas, as he argues “labor is only necessary ‘naturali ratione’ [by natural reason] for the maintenance of individual and community.”⁠

1970s, academic turned farmer Wendell Berry wrote about how economic success includes the hidden cost of depriving people “of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water.”⁠14 What was once the riches of self‑reliance have become things with a price.