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From a footnote found near the end of Richard Dienst's The Bonds of Debt, a book I will review near the end of next month:
[The] most absolute kind of debt, original sin... [is] an act that thus becomes a way to ensure that one's debts will never be paid except by the God who granted them.
The most original thing about Dienst's reading of debt, a reading that is very close to the truth, is that it locates it at the very center of human sociality. We are naturally indebted; each of us owes so much to people we know and do not know. To be an animal whose sociality has a significant cultural component is to have a high degree of indebtedness. The less an animal is culturally social, the less debts it has.

In Michelangelo's "Expulsion from the Garden of Eden," the ultimate debtors are anguished like there's no tomorrow. This image is nothing but a distortion of debt, a demonizing of the roots of our humanity: shared knowledge.

"[The] German word for 'debt' and 'guilt' is the same: die Schuld." In all of the current talk about the dangers of deficit spending, we are supposed to feel the pull of this guilt. But debt is not an anomaly; debt is in our very nature...

Washington (CNN) - The Republican National Committee raised $5.2 million last month, but still is saddled with a debt of more than $21 million from the 2010 midterm elections.

The RNC was able to pay $1 million toward reducing the debt in February, but received an additional $1 million in invoices from 2010 that left its financial position virtually unchanged, according to a report that will be filed this afternoon with the Federal Election Commission. CNN was provided the data prior to the filing.