When I was 18, I worked for the Tennessee Department of Conservation at the Cedars of Lebanon State Park, a summer job where a few teenagers helped the park’s permanent workers clean up the picnic areas and campgrounds and ball fields. I mostly helped two ageing characters who’d gotten their sinecures through political patronage. Both were near retirement, and were seeing out their working years with some easy work in pleasant surroundings. They had a black boss they didn’t much like — a park ranger — but they kept their racial sideswipes to a minimum, at least for those days.

Both were men of profound and “sincerely held religious beliefs and moral convictions,” as the saying goes. (Or rather, as the language of the new Jim Crow law in Mississippi goes.) They often held forth on weighty matters of faith and morals as we cruised the park in a truck, emptying trash cans and spending long (very long) breaks beside the big Cedar Park swimming pool, full to the brim of bikini-clad young women enjoying the fine Tennessee summer. Two expositions of their faith have long stood out in my memory. More

Well, the latest national growth stats are in and, despite all appearances, the poster boy for European austerity is hands down the fastest growing economy in the Eurozone. With GDP supposedly running at 7.8%, we're even outpacing the global titans of India and China.

The US media outlet CNN claimed that once again ‘Ireland is booming’. Yes, there it was: the dreaded b-word. It's not that an uptick in economic activity is unwelcome thing; it's more that in an Irish context, owing largely to the weak nature of indigenous Irish capitalism, the word "boom" is usually synonymous with bubble, and it seems another bubble could be building, but more on that later. More

I want to become rich, very rich, so rich that I lose track of my own money. I like to grab money whenever I get a chance to do so and then store it. I like money so much that I have developed a natural likeness towards words such as amass, pile, heap, stock, collect, store, hoard, reserve, collect etc. I like to sum up these words in a single word: accumulate. I like accumulating money and derive a great sense of satisfaction from the fact that I have more money than yesterday. There is something about money, perhaps a mysterious power that resides in it, that makes me crave it. I like to possess this power, the ultimate power of them all. But the more I have it, the more I want it. More