An Other Kingdom

2 NEIGHBORLY BELIEFS

The neighborly Covenant rests on beliefs in Abundance, Mystery, Fallibility, and the Common Good. It places faith in our communal capacity versus our consumer capacity.

ABUNDANCE

To believe in abundance is to believe that we have enough … Even in the wilderness of an uncertain future. This thinking is a stretch of the imagination. It envisions social relationships in a different world, in a manna-based culture. It’s a sharp contrast to a culture organized around commerce, a market ideology built on scarcity and the central premise that we cannot believe in sufficiency. It declares that we can never be satisfied with what we have, with the effect that customer satisfaction is truly an oxymoron.

A neighborly culture would declare that nature no longer needs to be productive. That raw land does not need to be developed. That we have enough without more development. It sees no need to extract from our lands and waters. It calls for an end to the belief that a community or an institution or even business has to grow or die to survive and have a meaningful life. Believing in enough means we can stop identifying with progress as the path to the good life.

MYSTERY

It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings to search it out.

—Prov. 25:2

The Neighborly Covenant promises an unknowable world. It is organized for surprise and believes that much of life is permanently unknowable. It values the vow, which is a commitment in the absence of specificity. ...