Recovering the Sacred Pattern of Common Life

Discovery 8: How Love Enters Economic Life

What resonates with you? What challenges you?

Oct 20, 2026

The Economy We Already Share

Becoming a businessman began changing the way I thought about economic life. For years, I had looked at business largely through the eyes of a progressive activist, criticizing a world I had never really inhabited. Now I was inside it, in relationship with people I had once mostly seen through the lens of my own worldview.

I was also a husband, father, neighbor, customer, and member of a community. I was working alongside people trying to make a living, support their families, build businesses, and contribute something of value to their community.

I still saw much that needed to change.

But living and working within the local economy forced me to confront some of the prejudice I had carried toward the business world.

That recognition didn’t lessen my desire for fundamental change. It changed how I understood the people who would be part of that change. For years I had tried to gather people around a shared vision of a better future and bring that vision into the larger society. Now I was discovering another path: economic transformation could begin within the relationships and shared needs of the whole community, not only among those who already shared the same economic vision.

I remember a conversation with a friend who used the term “post-capitalist” to describe a network for new culture and economy he was building. When I questioned the term, he thought I was asking him to stop using it. But that wasn’t my concern. If the term expressed the convictions of his network, I had no problem with them using it.

My concern was not the vision itself, but when sharing that vision became an unspoken condition for belonging, unintentionally excluding people who did not share it. I had experienced this firsthand at a New Economy conference in 2017.

I was sitting in a room with about twenty wonderful people imagining a different economic future. They spoke of cooperatives, the commons, and other alternatives to the dominant economy. I shared much of what they hoped to create. Yet as I listened, I began to feel as though I were in the wrong room.

Finally, I raised my hand. “I’ve been listening to your vision of the future,” I said, “and I don’t feel welcome here. I own a private corporation, and I don’t feel like there’s a place for me in the future you’re describing.”

The problem wasn’t that these people lacked a compelling vision. It was that I couldn’t see a place for someone like me within it. As I looked across other emerging economic movements, I saw the same pattern at work. Regenerative, Doughnut, cooperative, solidarity, gift, sharing, circular, post-capitalist, and other approaches were generating important ideas, experiments, and strong networks around different visions of economic life.

These movements were creating important alternatives, but the local economy included far more people, businesses, and other organizations than those participating in their networks.

Transforming the whole community’s economy meant including people who did not share the same economic vision but were already participating in its everyday life.

A Relational Path to Economic Change

That raised a more practical question for me: how could an alternative vision transform the economy of a whole community without the whole community having to join the alternative?

After forty years of working in communities, I had learned that you cannot build a new economy while remaining separated from the very economy you hope to change.

Yet the attraction-and-conversion model followed precisely that logic: build an alternative, attract people into it, and hope it eventually becomes the economy of the whole.

But I began to see that this approach was only one expression of a deeper system logic.

Within the Culture of Separation, we organize our part separately from the whole, then assume that growing our part will somehow transform the whole. The particular strategy may vary, but the underlying assumption remains the same: if our part grows large enough, it will eventually take over the whole.

Real communities are not transformed by one part gradually absorbing the others. A strategy that begins with separation cannot transform a whole community simply by bringing more people into our own camp. The vision may be compelling, but it still represents only one part of the community. The larger culture and economy already exist, made up of people and relationships that may never share that vision.

That is where change has to happen.

The local economy is not an abstraction waiting to be replaced. It’s a living social ecology, made up of people: shop owners, farmers, contractors, restaurant owners, employees, customers, and families trying to make a living and contribute to their community.

Any real economic transformation has to grow through the relationships already present in that ecology. Otherwise, even a compelling vision risks remaining confined to those who already believe in it. I had already seen this with the farmer. We had not created a new food system by excluding conventional farmers and waiting for a regenerative one to replace them.

We began with the food system that already existed, brought the people and organizations within it into relationship, and allowed new possibilities to grow from there.

Why would the larger economy, or the society around it, be any different?

Transforming the Logic of the Everything Industrial Complex

What I was seeing in the economy was not confined to economic life. The same underlying logic is at work across society. We organize ourselves into movements, sectors, institutions, professions, and communities around particular pieces of the good, each developing its own language, networks, measures of success, and ways of seeing.

Over time, even the organizations and movements we create to serve the good become specialized and competitive worlds, each with its own identity, constituency, and increasingly, its own brand.

Nonprofits compete for donors and grants. Businesses compete for customers and market share. Political organizations compete for votes and attention. Churches compete for members, influence, and even claims to the truth. Each may serve a different part of society, but the underlying logic is often the same: strengthen our part, distinguish it from the others, and compete for the resources we need to survive.

This is the larger pattern I have come to call the Everything Industrial Complex. It is not a conspiracy or a single centralized system. It is the result of the Culture of Separation taking form across our institutions and sectors, turning even the organizations and institutions we create to serve, heal, and transform society into separate and competing worlds.

And just when some readers may think I am singling out regenerative, New Economy, progressive, or other changemakers, the same critique has to be turned toward my own Christian world.

I have watched churches become deeply coherent communities while remaining disconnected from the wider social fabric around them. I have also watched the Body of Christ fragment within itself, as Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant apologists attack one another in ways that deepen polarization.

This fragmentation does more than divide us. It weakens our witness to the world and can obscure the transformative Love of Jesus beneath theological argument, institutional rigidity, and political capture.

Yet such divisions stand in contrast to the Christian calling, which is not to withdraw from the world or conquer it, but to live within it as salt and yeast, bringing the Kingdom near through reconciliation, love of neighbor, and lives that make Divine Love visible. Uniting the Body of Christ does not require sameness or complete theological agreement.

And that same principle extends beyond the Church. Serving the wider community does not require everyone to share our Christian beliefs. I experienced this firsthand in Logan Heights, where Christians served alongside people who did not share our beliefs, responding together to the real needs of the community. That experience showed me what can happen when the Church enters the wider community through relationship and service rather than separation.

Yet the Church itself remains vulnerable to the same larger pattern. When it absorbs the same logic of separation, competition, branding, and power that shapes the surrounding culture, something gets reversed. Instead of transforming the world through the Love of Christ, the Church itself begins to be transformed by the world.

What I was seeing within Christianity reflected the same pattern I had encountered throughout society. Businesses, nonprofits, governments, movements, and institutions can all be shaped by the same underlying logic. The problem is not their differences, but the values and motivations that guide their actions and the ways they relate to one another.

Recognizing this pattern across our institutions pointed me toward another pathway: building a parallel social reality within the existing community, one rooted in Divine Love and a Culture of Connection, capable of transforming the larger culture from within.

Building that parallel social reality does not begin with fighting top-down political and economic systems. It begins with ourselves. As Divine Love becomes embodied within us, we gain the capacity to live differently with one another. Our relationships, exchanges, and service begin to reflect intentional mutual benefit rather than self-interest, power over, and control.

As those relationships take root and spread through the community, they begin to transform the larger systems in which we live.

How Love Enters Exchange

None of these worlds stands outside economic life. They all depend upon the movement of money, labor, property, gifts, attention, knowledge, and other resources between people and institutions. The economy is not simply another silo among the others. Economic life moves through the whole social fabric.

Seeing how deeply the Culture of Separation shapes our common life changes the question for me. I am less interested in deciding what kind of economy should replace the old one and more interested in how economic life can serve the whole community.

Economic life already takes many forms. People give, share, buy, sell, lend, invest, volunteer, or simply help a neighbor. They do this through many kinds of organizations and institutions, or sometimes without any organization at all.

Just as I did not want to exclude a conventional farmer because he had not yet become organic, I do not want any particular approach to become the price of admission. What matters is whether our relationships and exchanges create real value for one another and the wider community, even across our differences. We do not have to become the same in order to belong and build together.

But creating mutual value together is only part of the transformation. Love changes the spirit in which we relate to one another and participate in economic life. Divine Love, embodied within us, becomes Virtue. Virtue shapes how we relate to one another, relationships build trust, and trust opens new possibilities for how we exchange, share, produce, serve, and steward what we have.

I would later discover that Pope Benedict XVI had given a name to this within economic life: gratuitousness, the spirit of gift. He helped me see that the economy itself can be transformed from within, not by replacing every existing institution or exchange, but by bringing generosity, mutual responsibility, and the Gift of Self into the ways we participate in them.

Benedict’s teaching gave me a new way to understand something I had already witnessed in Dr. Ari and had been struggling to practice myself: the movement from self-centered love toward self-giving Love.

The question is no longer only “What can I get?” but also “What can I give?

This does not mean replacing markets with a gift economy. People can still buy and sell, compete, earn profits, build businesses, or simply give something away. Gratuitousness changes the spirit in which we participate in those exchanges. It brings the Gift of Self into economic life, so that even ordinary transactions can become opportunities to serve, build trust, create mutual benefit, and contribute to the flourishing of the community.

Love becomes more than the architecture between us. It begins to flow through the economy itself, through the ways we share our gifts, meet one another’s needs, exchange value, and steward what we have.

How Love Circulates Through Economic Life

Once I began looking at economic life this way, another question emerged: what did we actually mean by wealth?

I began to see that wealth goes beyond money and material assets. It involves not only what we possess, but the trust, generosity, and capacity to serve that grow through our relationships, as well as the kind of people we are becoming.

Then I recognized that the relationships and trust we had been building were not only social infrastructure. They were also becoming part of the community’s economic infrastructure.

Money matters, of course. Businesses need revenue. People need livelihoods. Families need homes and food. Communities need investment and productive enterprise. But money is not the only form of wealth I was seeing around me.

A retired person had decades of knowledge. A church had an unused room. A business owner had relationships and experience. A farmer had land and equipment. A young person had energy and creativity. A neighborhood had people willing to help one another. An organization had volunteers. Someone else knew exactly the person another person needed to meet.

Communities are rich with forms of wealth that rarely appear on a balance sheet: relationships, knowledge, skills, trust, creativity, generosity, cultural memory, spiritual depth, land, buildings, institutions, and, perhaps most important, people’s willingness to serve.

But I was also beginning to recognize another form of wealth, less visible than the others. I eventually came to call it Spiritual Capital.

Spiritual Capital is the relational wealth that grows as self-giving Love takes form between us. It doesn’t live in banks or spreadsheets. It lives between us: in generosity offered, trust earned, commitments honored, fairness practiced, and our willingness to serve one another and seek each other’s good.

Yet even with all this wealth already present, much of it remained disconnected and unable to serve the wider community.

Here again, the challenge was not simply creating something new, but connecting what was already there: the good, the relationships, and the resources. I came to think of these as “frozen assets”: resources, skills, relationships, capital, productive capacity, and supply chains that already existed but remained underused because different parts of the community were disconnected.

As new pathways of relationship form across those separations, trust and generosity began to unlock those assets, allowing value to flow where it had previously been blocked.

Bringing people together did more than make that hidden wealth visible. Connecting previously separated people and resources unlocked wealth that was already there. But the relationships themselves also generated something new: relational wealth. As relationships deepened, existing resources became more useful, and new value emerged through the connections themselves. I started noticing the possibilities everywhere.

Someone with decades of experience could share what they knew with someone just starting out. A church room sitting empty during the week could become a place for people to gather. A farmer could find a restaurant looking for local food. A business owner could make the introduction someone else needed. A young person could find a mentor. Someone with resources could help a local enterprise get started. And sometimes what a person had to give was simply their time, their care, or their willingness to help.

Some of this value moved through money. Much of it did not.

Spiritual Capital did not replace financial or material wealth. It strengthened the trust through which those resources could be shared, exchanged, and put to use.

The Heart of the Marketplace

Seeing wealth this way changed how I understood the marketplace.

For years I had thought about economic life through a familiar divide: capitalism on one side, socialism or collectivism on the other. But the more I worked with local businesses and communities, the less that divide seemed to explain what I was seeing.

What people around me called capitalism increasingly looked like something else: a form of global corporatism in which large corporations and political institutions had become deeply intertwined, concentrating economic and political power.

But resisting that system did not require rejecting markets themselves. Markets long predated these ideologies and grew out of the basic human practice of exchange.

People have always found ways to create, give, share, barter, buy, sell, lend, and invest. The question is not whether markets should exist, but what animates them. What relationships and values shape the way we exchange with one another? When economic life remains rooted in relationship and moral responsibility, what we have to offer can become a means of serving one another.

Yet despite their different approaches to markets and economic organization, capitalism, socialism, and communism share something fundamental: a materialist understanding of economic life and reality itself. Within this framework, human beings are understood primarily through their economic roles: as producers, consumers, workers, owners, or members of classes. The central concern becomes how material resources, production, and ownership are organized.

But the consequences of this materialist understanding go far beyond how we organize the economy. They invert the relationship between the human person and the economic system. Rather than starting with the intrinsic spiritual dignity and value of the human person, these ideologies begin with the organization of material life. Instead of asking how economic life can serve human flourishing, they seek to shape the human person through the economic and social conditions in which people live.

And here lies the great irony: systems that promise human liberation can end up reducing the human person to an instrument of the very economic machinery supposedly created to serve humanity.

I saw something very different in Reno. After we had mapped nearly 150 local businesses on butcher paper, we began identifying the trusted connectors within that network. I met individually with several business owners, asking whether they wanted to help build a local living economy where we supported one another and encouraged the community to shop locally. Eventually, eight business owners and nonprofit leaders gathered around a table. We began not with economic strategy, but with personal stories.

Behind their economic roles were people with hopes, fears, dreams, and a genuine desire to contribute to their community. They were not simply owners, producers, or economic actors. They were human beings whose worth, relationships, and capacity to serve existed long before we began building an economic network.

That experience helped me recognize what was becoming a different starting point for economic life. The more I saw value arising through people’s gifts, relationships, trust, and service, the more I recognized that the economic system must serve the human person, not the other way around. Our intrinsic worth comes first.

That realization raised another question for me: where does economic value itself begin? Not from an economic system. It begins with human beings and the gifts they carry: their creativity, relationships, knowledge, labor, and capacity to serve. Our human worth is inherent, but the economic value of our gifts takes shape as we bring them into relationship and exchange. Whether those gifts become sources of mutual benefit, exploitation, or something in between depends on the relationships and values that shape how they are offered and exchanged.

From this perspective, no single form of business organization has a monopoly on the good. A family business could serve the community. So could a cooperative, a nonprofit, a corporation, a land trust, or someone simply giving time to a neighbor.

What matters is not the form itself, but whether the gifts and relationships within it are shaped by trust, reciprocity, service, and mutual benefit. That realization opened the circle rather than narrowing it. Restaurant owners can still compete for customers. The organic farmer can still advocate for organic agriculture. Businesses can still make profits.

Serving the whole does not require people or organizations to give up their particular interests. It means widening the circle of who we consider part of “us,” so that pursuing our particular interests also becomes an opportunity to serve the wider community.

Building the Virtuous Economy

This was Symbiotic Kinship taking shape in economic life: expanding our circle of affiliation beyond those who think, vote, worship, or live like us, and intentionally building relationships across difference for shared purpose and mutual benefit. As that circle widens, even the way we understand ownership, exchange, and enterprise begins to change.

We can understand ownership not simply as possession, but as stewardship of what has been entrusted to us. Exchange can include reciprocity and gift. Enterprise can contribute not only to individual success but to the flourishing of the community around it. The economy remains an economy, but one rooted in relationship rather than transaction alone.

What surprised me was discovering, only later, that this relational view of economic life was closer to Adam Smith’s original understanding than the narrow caricature of self-interest I had associated with capitalism. Smith was a moral philosopher before he wrote The Wealth of Nations, and his understanding of human beings included sympathy and concern for the well-being of others.

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith wrote, “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others...”

Smith helped me recognize something fundamental: markets do not eliminate the need for Virtue. They depend upon it. Economic freedom alone is not enough; it requires virtuous participation.

A transaction can do more than exchange value. Shaped by Virtue, it can also generate trust, deepen relationship, and create new Spiritual Capital. As these ways of relating spread through the marketplace, they begin to form what I came to understand as a Virtuous Economy: economic life transformed from within by the character and relationships of the people participating in it.

A Virtuous Economy does not begin with designing the perfect economic system. It begins with the human heart. As we move from self-centered love toward self-giving Love, we become more capable of bringing trust, generosity, service, stewardship, and care into whatever economic forms we inhabit.

This is not simply spiritual language attached to the marketplace. Here again, the Pattern takes practical form:

Divine Love enters economic life as we offer our gifts in service to real human needs and allow Virtue to shape how we relate, exchange value, and steward what has been entrusted to us.

As these different forms of value circulate through relationships, a larger question emerges: what happens when this occurs not only within individual networks, but across the life of an entire community?

What kind of social and political reality begins to emerge then?

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Go to Discovery 9: How Love Becomes People Power