What we must worship and obey

Theologian Harvey Cox once wrote about the business pages as found in most print media, through which (friends told him) he could “learn about the real world.”

“Expecting a terra incognita,” he writes, “I found myself instead in the land of déja vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God.

“Market ‘failures,’ to high priests like Alan Greenspan, were mainly evidence of inadequate faith.

“The God in this theology is The Market itself, which once competed with other centers of value and meaning but in the past two centuries has risen to become ‘First Cause’ - not a god like Zeus, who has to contend with competing deities, but rather like the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible, ‘the only true God, whose reign must now be universally accepted and who allows for no rivals.’”