"You’re Making a Lot of False Assumptions that the Market Is a Natural Order, When It Is a Cultural Creation"

"You need to have a change in your basic understanding of how or where God works in the world before you can envision different economic behaviors as morally sufferable. These religious changes come first. The market--networks of exchange, converging prices, things being adjudicated in courts--is not put in place in North America until the 1740s,1750s. The religious changes come before that. They’re integral to it."

Michael Fitzgerald in The Boston Globe interviews Mark Valeri, author of Heavenly Merchandize.