SERENE JONES [President of Union theological seminary]: You ask how you would define this crisis? I think it’s a crisis of value. We have misplaced, in deep ways, the ruler that we use to measure what matters most in life. And it has become completely exhausted by monetary value. …

How do we help [my theological students] understand the crisis in such a way that the remaking of the fabric, which can allow our democracy to thrive, happens? And, again, I just keep thinking it’s the simple concepts. How do we get people to rediscover love? …

BILL MOYERS: But isn’t it a fantasy to think that love can tame capitalism. …

CORNEL WEST: … love is not a real small thing. Love is not just the key that unlocks the door to ultimate reality. But there would be no weekend if there were not a trade union movement that loved justice enough, and loved working people enough, so that bosses wouldn’t treat them like commodities to be marginalized.

There would not be racial, the racial justice that we have of Martin King and Fannie Lou Hamer and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Phil Berrigan. There wouldn’t be, without the love that you all had for justice, and the love enough for black people, to say, “Quit niggerizing these people. Quit intimidating them. Quit trying to make them so scared that they won’t stand up and fight.” Love is a serious thing. When you love your mamma, you take a bullet for her if she’s treated unjustly. That’s why justice is what love looks like in public.

SERENE JONES: But this thing about the story of love that we have the capacity for includes, within it, a recognition of the harshness and the brokenness and the darkness of our lives. And love exists in that. It doesn’t exist despite it.

CORNEL WEST: That’s right.

BILL MOYERS: I’m not sure you haven’t confused love with justice.

SERENE JONES: Justice is nothing but love with legs. Justice is what love looks like when it takes social form.
(Emphasis added)

As an economic policy geek, I feel a little silly talking about love and the economy. How do you talk about it without sounding like a complete idiot? Well, here’s Exhibit A. And Serene Jones’ line gets it just right: “Justice is nothing but love with legs.”

I’m not sure how I’m going to fold this kind of approach into my economic model. Maybe I’ll fail miserably and look like an idiot. But I’d rather run the risk of making a fool of myself than build the economic model that, like the one that blew up this fall, fails because it hides from reality.