These brief remarks are for those who’ve asked me to summarize the main themes in my book, What Your Money Means and How to Use It Well  (Frank J. Hanna, III, Crossroad Publishing, 2008).




“As heaven is for the gods,
so the earth has been given to all mankind,
and lands uninhabited are common to all.”
Tacitus (c. 55 – c. 117)


The wonderful thing about our world is that the fundamental things we each need to survive are, in principle at least, available to each of us: food, water, shelter. I don’t mean that each of us actually and always has access to these fundamentals. With poverty so great in our world, that’s patently false.

I mean that we weren’t put into a forbidding world like Mars which produces neither food for us to eat, water to drink, or trees that can be formed into shelter. No matter how great our wealth, had we been born on Mars where none of the fundamentals exist, our physical nature would have condemned us to a quick and dusty death.

No.

You and I were put into a rich world that provides us the fundamentals that, by nature, we need; a world wonderfully proportioned to our needs, a world that, in all its basics (land, air, water, weather, and the millions of plants and animals that populate it) and in its goodness and beauty, seems particularly designed to sustain us, to make us thrive, and even to give us joy.

God did not place us into this world filled with the fundamentals that, by our nature, we need, and then condemn us to quick death by denying us the right to use these fundamentals to sustain ourselves.

Instead, on the use of the fruits of the earth, there has been no divine prohibition or other natural prohibition that we have ever encountered.

At this fact we marvel too little. We were not just placed on this planet; the planet was given to us for our home.

Given.

We did not purchase it; we did not inherit it. It was given.

From that one fact flow incredible conclusions.