If debtors prisons were still in fashion, many countries around the world would now be in jail. Poland, Rumania, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico—all recently have found themselves teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, unable to pay even the interest on the money they owe to Western governments and banks. And the list keeps growing longer. Over the last year nearly three dozen Third World and East European nations have fallen into arrears' on their foreign loans. Never before have so many countries come so close to default on so much debt.

The visitor flying into Lesotho—the tiny nation-state wholly surrounded by South Africa—gets to see a bit of the country before landing. It's enough to give him second thoughts. The parched, brown land stretches in all directions; and nowhere is there a hint of the lush mountain kingdom promised in the tourist board's brochures.

The Air Lesotho forty-seater touches down at Chief Leabua Jonathan International Airport, a single building in a vast field. The scrutiny of passport control, then the visitor is whisked down Chief Leabua Jonathan Highway toward Maseru, the capital. The highway is flanked by conical huts with thatched roofs and rows of public housing— cinder-block boxes topped with corrugated iron. The huts and boxes continue into the very heart of the capital, where the visitor's car turns onto Maseru's main road, the Kingsway. The sign readsr “Welcome to Lesotho, Africa's friendly mountain kingdom.” Perhaps it should read: Welcome to the poorest place on earth.

In the last few centuries the conventional assumption of both modern secularists and the religious communities has been that our world is too new, our problems too unprecedented, for the ancient systems of religious thought and practice to be useful. I am proposing exactly the opposite approach: That precisely because our world is so new, we must draw on the ancient wisdoms.

We might test this approach against the one fact of our lives that is the most radically unprecedented: that the survival of the human race is in danger, and even the survival of all life on earth is in serious question. How could there emerge from ancient religious traditions that are rooted in a world of firewood and olive oil, spears and chariots, any useful answers to this unprecedented possibility?