a different kind of recovery

At the God's Politics blog, Brian McLaren offers a different vision for economic recovery:

I’d like to suggest another kind of recovery … drawing from the world of addiction. When an addict gets into recovery, he doesn’t want to go back and recover the “high” he had before, or even to recover the conditions he had before he began using drugs and alcohol. Instead, he wants to move forward to a new way of life — a wiser way of life that takes into account his experience of addiction.

Perhaps that's what the Western world needs right now: To move beyond our addiction to consumerism, into a new way of life. You can read McLaren's entire article here.