Faith and free markets
For the past four years, the Harvard Divinity School (HDS) Episcopal/Anglican Fellowship has hosted the annual New England Anglican Studies Conference, an academic and ecumenical summit. The theme of this year’s symposium, set for Friday and Saturday, is “Christianity and Capitalism.” The Gazette spoke with Charles Stang, the event’s faculty sponsor and an associate professor of early Christian Thought at HDS, about how Christians can balance their faith and religious values with a capitalist system that aims to maximize profit and wealth. GAZETTE: What inspired the conference? STANG: I’m the faculty sponsor of “Christianity and Capitalism.” But the conference really emerged from the passions of HDS students who were involved in the Occupy movements. Our Call for Papers (hdsepisc.org) tries to capture the motivation for the conference, and its aims and purposes. I’m speaking here as a participant, not as a single spokesman. GAZETTE: Is charity a rare value that melds capitalism and...