In scriptural texts we think important, the point is made over and over again: Your moral activities can affect the rain, the harvest, and the health of everything you love. The link between moral choices and material outcomes is made continually, and it is received and studied toward normative action. The texts suggest the interruption of desire, of consumption, and of acquisition.

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We dig up what is left of life crushed to carbon beneath us, and we burn it: to make important things, really—hospital intensive care units, synthetically derived insulin and steel beams for the new high school library. But we burn it for nothing, too, really, for vanity and emptiness.