Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Co-ops and the Church of Latter Day Saints

 I´ve been very interested to find that the Church of Latter Day Saints, the Mormons, have some involvement with the co-operative model of business.  I see the connection between Christianity and the co-operative model as fundamental, and reflecting the struggle in Christianity between the essence of its teachings of social responsibility and the diversion of many of its denominations´doctrines.  Social responsibility is represented widely in modern times by groups known variously as non-profit groups or civil society organizations, co-operative businesses, have origins in Western society traceable through universities and to Christianity.  St. Dominic started his order of monks in the 12th or 13th Century with the intent to convince heretics of their doctrinal truth and in an attempt to avoid the worst violence of the Inquisitions, for example.  St. Thomas of Aquinas was a Dominican monk who then became the giant of the Greco-Christian synthesis, the organizational principle underlying the modern university system and modern science and technology.  The Quaker Religious Society of Friends are another example that arose in England and influenced early anti-slavery organizing in the first Anti-Slavery Society in England, which influenced the UK´s position at the 1815 Congress of Vienna.

 Excerpts from the Apostolic Circular on the Economy (1875)

Stephen Wellington's picture

Excerpts from the Apostolic Circular on the Economy 1875
The First Presidency
and Council of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-Day Saints

THE EXPERIENCE OF MANKIND has shown that the people of communities and nations among whom wealth is the most equally distributed, enjoy the largest degree of liberty, are the least exposed to tyranny and oppression and suffer the least from luxurious habits which beget vice. Under such a system, carefully maintained there could be no great aggregations of either real or personal property in the hands of a few; especially so while the laws, forbidding the taking of usury or interest for money or property loaned, continued in force. 


see the whole doc at: http://www.ldscooperative.com/proclamation

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