Money Autobiography

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The Reading Room

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The Woman’s Book of Money & Spiritual Vision
by Rosemary Williams with Joanne Kabak

Money and spirituality are not mutually exclusive. There is a spiritual dimension to money that can be tapped for your benefit—and for the wider world as well.

This is a book about awareness, acceptance, and action. It starts with understanding your personal financial facts and uncovering the feelings that these facts bring up. It continues by focusing on how to create alignment between your personal financial picture and your core values.

It ends by encouraging you to develop a personal action plan. Whether your funds are significant or minimal, reading The Woman’s Book of Money & Spiritual Vision can be a transformative experience.

Books and Reviews

If you would like to review a book on the topics of money and/or spirituality for women, please send your 3 or 4 paragraph review to us at info@womensperspective.org.

If you have a book you would like one of our readers to review, please contact us.

One Big Happy Family by Rebecca Walker, editor

Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover

Money enters into our deepest relationships: those between spouses, lovers, and life-long friends, between siblings, or parents and children. Money is part and parcel of family and communal life, and hence many of us know well the strain that financial difficulties, and even financial success, can put on our relationships. So how do we make both the big and little decisions that connect our finances and family? Moreover, how do we do so in ways that are all at once good financially, good for our relationships, and good for ourselves?

One Big Happy Family, an anthology edited by writer and activist Rebecca Walker, is a collection of stories about people seeking to be both creative and intentional in framing their relationships and family life. While not exclusively focused on questions of money, many of the included stories get at some of the complex questions about the economics of family and friendship: How do two spouses from very different class backgrounds learn to make financial decisions together? How does one navigate financial issues in cross-cultural marriages? What does friendship mean when it's with someone you also employ to work in your household? And they tackle some of the incredibly common issues that somehow remain the thorniest: Judith Levine looks at balancing commitment and independence in “Love, Money, and the Unmarried Couple,” for instance, while Marc and Amy Vashon discuss the challenges of two parents seeking to equally invest and share everything – time, money, emotions - in their children and marriage, in “Half the Work, All the Fun.”

This isn't a collection of how-to essays. It's a collection of stories, of people living and experimenting, striving to find the best way to combine their values, passions, and daily life with those of the people they love. Not all the questions they ask, or the solutions they find, may be the same as yours. But there is something to be learned in each account, each sincere attempt, to live, as Walker calls it, the “realities of truly modern love.”

Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez with Monique Tilford

Publisher: Penguin Books
An updated classic is reviewed by the next generation of readers

Your Money or Your Life is an immensely practical book. But its usefulness, and its continued popularity since its original 1992 release, surely exist largely because this practicality is rooted in a deep and discerning analysis of our society's current economic and cultural systems, and in careful observation of human behavior and character. Authors Vicki Robin, Joe Dominguez, and Monique Tilford wisely see personal growth not as a matter only of individual will, but as a matter of reconceptualizing the frameworks that shape how we perceive the world, both individually and collectively. Change thus comes from new understandings of the world we live in, and of how that world shapes us; new realizations about our own needs and wants, and new visions of how to fulfill those in transformative ways; and ultimately, in connecting our new understanding to habits and practices that can instill in us financial intelligence and help us to become financially independent.

One of the best examples of this is the way in which Robin and her coauthors help readers to reconceptualize the idea of 'work' and the notion that a job – especially the high-powered jobs that fit common, modern notions of success – is the best available method to provide for ourselves. They offer revealing exercises that help us to understand how much of our personal resources – both financial, emotional, physical, and others – go into maintaining our job, rather than into ourselves, our families, and the many other things which we value, and to see new ways in which we might meet our basic needs. These exercises and tools help readers to draw useful comparisons between financial and non-financial resources, empowering us to see new possibilities for action, and new solutions to old problems. 

If you are a skeptic of self-help books (and the book's subtitle, “9 steps to transforming your relationship with money and achieving financial independence,” surely marks it as such), Your Money or Your Life is worth setting aside your preconceptions to experience what it has to offer. With humor and optimism, the authors have crafted a unique toolkit for helping all of us draw the connections between our personal lives and the larger financial crises happening around us, and for taking meaningful action in response. Now “updated for the 21st century,” it is an important book for the times in which we live.

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

      I waited six months on the library's hold list for this book, and having finally read it, I can understand now why it is so popular.  Many of the stories about women facing violence, mutilation, discrimination in other parts of the globe are horrifying and haunting, and it almost numbs the mind to realize that these stories are not unique but are being repeated again and again villages and cities and farmlands all over the world. 

     It could have been tempting to set the book aside as too hard, too graphic, too disturbing to read in the comfort of my rocking chair, and if the point of the book had been the horror of it all, I would have done just that.  But the suffering is only one aspect of the stories.  The real point of this book is that we can make a difference in the lives of individual women and in the unfolding of the world story.  I was inspired by the stories of women (and men) in every chapter who are changing the world by relentless efforts to right one wrong, acting on visions of a world where women are truly valued as fully human beings.  The final chapter is "What You Can Do", perhaps most inspiring of all, as we each are challenged to take steps to make a difference.

Money and the Meaning of Life by Jacob Needleman

Publisher: Currency

“We never gave ourselves the task of really attending to the material world. We never understood that conscious attention to the material world is precisely what frees us from it, separates us from it, gives us the space and time we long for.”

This is among one of the many theses Jacob Needleman argues for in his bestseller Money and the Meaning of Life. Throughout, he strives to marshal wisdom from a wide array of traditions and connect them to his personal experience. Much of the book is occupied by his recounting the experience of teaching a single course based on the book's title. Hence to read Needleman is to struggle along with him and his students as they attempt to understand the way in which money has evolved throughout history to occupy its current cultural role as mediator of almost all human interaction and human ego. Together, they conclude that a simple distancing oneself from the material, from money, never helps us truly improve either our spiritual or physical lives: only by cultivating an awareness of the way money links us to others, along with a consciousness of the inherent role of giving and receiving in human life, can we understand money and its connection or separation from meaning.

There is an audacity to Needleman, that some may find abrasive. This is in part representative of his context and history: he is clearly a San Francisco philosopher heavily influenced by the 1960s, captivated not only with the idea of a single truth connecting all religion but with his ability as a spiritual teacher to present that truth. His focus on the history of man, especially, and man's spiritual journey, will undoubtedly feel anachronistic to some Women's Perspective members. Nonetheless, his observations and questions remain useful and challenging in considering what place money does, and should, play in society today.

Megatrends 2010 - the Rise of Conscious Capitalism

Patricia Aburdene
Publisher: Hampton Roads Publishing Company

Money as Sacrament: Finding the Sacred in Money

Adele Azar-Rucquoi
Publisher: Ten Speed Press

Faith and Feminism: A Holy Alliance

Helen LaKelley Hunt
Publisher: Atria Books

Seasons of Grace: The Life-Giving Practice of Gratitude

Alan Jones and John O'Neil
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Women and the U.S. Budget: Where Your Money Goes and What You Can Do About It

Jane Midgley
Publisher: New Society Publishers

What Kids Really Want That Money Can't Buy: Tips for Parenting in a Commercial World

Betsy Taylor
Publisher: Warner Books

The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

Lynne Twist with Teresa Baker
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co. Magazines

Periodicals

Kosmos: The Integral Journal for Global Citizens

www.kosmosjournal.org

Sojourners

Dedicated to articulating the biblical call to social justice, inspiring hope, and building a movement to transform individuals, communities, the church, and the world.
www.sojo.net

Tikkun

Explore the current and back issues of the electronic version of this Jewish-liberal magazine on politics and society.