Free Trade and Faithful Globalization Saving the Market

Through an analysis of Christian communities in the United States, Canada, and Costa Rica, this book analyzes how religious groups talk about the politics surrounding economic life. Amy Reynolds examines how these Christian organizations speak about trade and the economy as moral and value-laden spaces, deserving ethical reflection and requiring political action. She reveals the ways in which religious communities have asked people to engage in new approaches to thinking about the market and how they have worked to create alternative networks and policies governing economic and social life.

Introduction; 1. Producing market discourse; 2. Too flawed for reform: the Canadian Christian struggle for an alternative economic order; 3. Covenants and treaties: PCUSA's evolving trade policy; 4. Dialogue and development: the Costa Rican Catholic response to CAFTA; 5. The political and economic discourse of religious communities; 6. Encouraging religious communities to promote the common good.

Amy Reynolds is an assistant professor of sociology and the coordinator of the Gender Studies Certificate Program at Wheaton College, Illinois. She received her PhD in sociology from Princeton University, New Jersey, her MPP in public policy from Georgetown University, Washington DC, and her BA in sociology from Harvard University, Massachusetts. Before teaching at Wheaton College, she was a visiting Fellow at Notre Dame's Kellogg Institute for International Studies. She previously worked for World Relief in El Salvador investigating the coffee industry and alternative markets. Her publications have appeared in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and the Latin American Research Review.