Other "Lose, Vague, and Indeterminant" Terms

Along the line of trying to determine the best name for what I'm currently calling "Millennial Social Thought," there are other instances of confusingly similar terms in this area. For instance, some people use the terms "religious economics" and "economics of religion" interchangably, while others view them as two different things. I'm probably in the "two different things" camp: to me religious economics is when economics is influenced by religious views, while the economics of religion is applying economic principles to religious actions. If you give some of your income away because of a religious principle you are practicing religious economics, but if you theorize that actions in testimony meeting can be explained with a signalling model you are practicing the economics of religion.

Similarly, the term "consecration" just means "to make holy" to most people, but to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints it means "the dedication of all resources." To some "stewardship" might mean nothing more than princple management, but to certain groups of Christians it implies a future reckoning with God about how the resources were managed.

Hypercycloids and Circles

When I was younger my brother taught me how to use straight lines on graph paper to draw the things that comprise the Pittsburgh Steelers logo (which I learned much later are called hypercycloids). I thought it was awesome and I did it all the time. It was my version of that dumb angled S thing that everyone else drew when they were 10 years old.

I have often wondered if the circular shape you get out of such a drawing is, in fact, a circle. So I decided to figure it out.

A Simpler Name

Several months ago, Steve commented and suggested perhaps a name like "Consecrated" or "Consecrationist Social Thought" might do the trick for what I have been thinking of as "Restored Christian Social Thought." That's not bad, except that many people who think about these things already think of Catholic Social Thought as CST. But then this week I had this idea: what about "Millennial Social Thought" as a name? I think it captures the idea with a new term that isn't going to be confused for something else, and it helps move the idea beyond one religion's viewpoint, since several religions have ideas about utopian societies. So I'll be moving forward with the term "Millennial Social Thought," or "MST."

Inspiration

I don't remember how I first became aware of Seth Godin or his blog, but my Feedly account has included him for a while now. I appreciate his posts because they are usually short little jabs to go be awesome, and I need jabs like that.

Two weeks ago he had a post about how hard it is to produce content when feedback is missing. It motivated me to recommit to blogging about Restored Christian Social Thought. So here I am, recommitting.

Thanks, Seth.