Wynne Godley On Sensibility

Wynne Godley in a 1988 article, The Sensibility Of Contemporary Institutions in Theology, (first given as a Sermon before the University in King’s College Chapel, 31 May 1987:

Recourse to the dictionary gives, among the definitions of the word sensibility, ‘the glad or sorrowful recognition of a fact or a condition of things’. Also, ‘readiness to feel compassion for suffering’.

But the major issues at stake have been vastly more important than ones which concern sensibility narrowly defined. They go beyond who becomes rich and who remains poor. They extend to matters such as slavery, mass unemployment and civil war.

… The IMF would do well to reperuse its own Article I, which .lists among its purposes: ‘to facilitate the expansion and balanced growth of international trade, and to contribute thereby to the promotion and maintenance of high levels of employment and real income and to the development of the productive resources of all members as primary objectives of economic policy … ‘ In this passage you hear the authentic note of optimism and mutual concern which informed economic relationships within and between countries in the first twenty-five years after the war.

I have been forced to recognize with sadness and very great disappointment that I have so far failed in my personal endeavour to change the course of events or the attitudes of other people. But I remain steadfast to what I understand to be the meaning of Christianity: the unique value it places on the individual inner life; the ability to tolerate aloneness and the imminence of death; the joyful and sensitive concern for and love of other human beings.

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