New York Times, Sunday, October 20, 2002, by Erika Kinetz
Available to New York Times subscribers at www.nytimes.com/2002/10/20/nyregion/20GREE.html?tntemail0

THE SETTING
The New York Public Library, where 100 New Yorkers spent Tuesday night taking a hard look at their souls. The topic—appropriate in this city of the rich and acquisitive—was "Greed," the second in a series of lectures on the seven deadly sins. The hosts were the library and Oxford University Press, which is to publish a series of books on sin next year. The speaker was Phyllis Tickle, a majestic 68-year-old from Tennessee who is a contributing editor in religion at Publishers Weekly and has written more than two dozen books on religion and spirituality.

THE BUZZ
New Yorkers in search of moral guidance do not go barefoot into the wilderness. They sat against walls made of rare yellow and black Sienese marble with inlaid bronze acanthus bells, beneath a domed skylight. Some brought Citarella bags.

"Greed is the most social, and by extension, the most political of sins," said Ms. Tickle, who was wearing a simple plaid jacket and a long skirt. But Arthur Andersen came up only once, and State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, patron saint of greed-busters, was not mentioned at all (and in an election year!).

Rather than titillate her audience with tidbits about L. Dennis Kozlowski's loot, Ms. Tickle chose to take the long view, marching her audience through 2,000 years of avarice, beginning with St. Paul and ending with Mario Donizetti's paintings of the seven deadly sins.

Afterward, a woman in the audience said she feared that soon the only freedom left would be the freedom to consume. A murmur of excitement rippled through the crowd. "Ah!" Ms. Tickle exclaimed. "Gluttony will be delighted."

"What is missing is the grace of self-discipline," she added. "Where do we learn to say: 'I have an income of $50,000. I have fixed costs of $20,000, and the other $30,000 I must put back to the use of the earth and to the use of her people.'"

The answer: Probably not in a place like New York City.

"We are here in this society with the obligation to spend money because we are going to destroy our economy if we don't continue on that treadmill," said Hargis Thomas, director of sales of Bibles at Oxford University Press. "It reeks of greed."

His friend Ana Hernandez, a bookseller at the Episcopal Book Resource Center, chimed in. "I sell God," she said.

"I sell Bibles," Mr. Thomas said.

"I sell books about simplicity," Ms. Hernandez said. "I sell books that tell people they shouldn't buy any more books."

But how to purify the greedy soul? Through money, of course.