A note on debt relief by N.T. Wright

This note on global debt was posted just the other day:
http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Debt.htm

Wright mentions his recent book Surprised by Hope, here are a few excerpts on the subject:

"But every time we put it off one more day, several hundred children die...We must learn, therefore, to recognize the complex arguments against debt remission as what they are. People tell you it's a tricky and many-sided subject. Yes, it is; so was slavery. So are all major moral problems. The fact remains that what is now going on amounts to theft by the strong from the weak, by the rich from the poor....

"Thus when people object...commenting that wealth is not finite, that statist and globalist solutions and handouts will merely strip the poor of their human dignity and vocation to work, and that all this will encourage the poor toward a sinful envy of the rich...I want to take such commentators to refugee camps, to villages where children die every day, to towns where most adults have already died of AIDS, and show them people who haven't got the energy to be envious, who aren't slothful because they are using all the energy they've got to wait in line for water...

"The irony is that those American churches that protest most vocally against the teaching of Darwinism in their schools are often, in their public policies, supporting a kind of economic Darwinism, the survival of the fittest in world markets and military power."

Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (2008), by N.T. Wright, pp.217-220.