Reconciling God and mammon

PAUL Oslington, an economist with a degree in theology, is careful not to make the obvious point that a world that worships mammon has lately been brought undone by it.

PAUL Oslington, an economist with a degree in theology, is careful not to make the obvious point that a world that worships mammon has lately been brought undone by it.

"A lot of people have asked me: 'What does Christian theology have to say about the financial crisis?"' the newly appointed Australian Catholic University professor admits.

"I think it has given an opening for a lot of people to have a cheap shot at capitalism and economists. I'm not sure the problem is economists, I think part of the problem is the philosophical and theological framework economics sits in.

"Individuals have lost sight of that bigger story of what life means. There is a real sense in which it's a failure of the moral and theological framework in which people operate, and that includes us as economists."

Back in Australia after a year at the Princeton Theological Seminary in the US, University of Sydney-trained Oslington's brief is to work in ACU's schools of economics and theology.

He brought with him a $US300,000 ($495,400) grant from the US-based John Templeton Foundation to investigate setting up an international centre for research into the links between thedisciplines.

"They think Australia is a very, very long way away," he says of the foundation, which he hopes will be persuaded to site the centre here if he can establish strong connections with respected international universities.

He is keen to explore how a theological take on economics can contribute to important public policy debates in Australia. A clear example of how the relationship plays out occurred when the Howard government outsourced its labour market assistance services to private and community organisations in 1998, setting up Job Network.

Churches were among those organisations and were thrown into an interesting dilemma, he says. "They were in an awkward position because they were bringing their religious identity to all this work," Oslington says. "We ended up with this intersection between the religious sector and the markets."

Church reactions included a refusal to have anything to do with Job Network or trying it and withdrawing. There were also some, he says, who took to it with "almost indecent gusto".

But he is also interested in why economics and theology have had so little to do with each other.

"What I think is really strange is that (theology) has not received any attention from economists and historians of economic thought," he says.

Oslington is particularly interested in 18th-century economist Adam Smith, although he makes no claim regarding Smith's religious beliefs.

"It's not widely recognised that Adam Smith had an implicit theological background for his economics," he says.

More will be revealed during the conference Adam Smith as Theologian, to be held in Edinburgh next year, which will commemorate the 250th anniversary of the publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which Smith lays out the moral framework underpinning the economic system.

Oslington is also planning to set up a doctoral program in economics and religion at ACU and an international conference on the future of his new interdisciplinary field.