The FDIC lists 64 bank failures in the first seven months of 2009. That’s more than all the rest of this decade combined (49, including no failures at all in ’05 and ’06).

Most of these failures have been small local banks, heavily exposed to either the mortgage bubble (Sunbelt, especially) or the collapse of manufacturing (the Eastern Midwest).

There is something particularly alarming about a bank failure, because it whispers about our economic security in ways mass layoffs don’t.

How should Christians think and feel about bank failures?

Pictured: A run on the bank in 1907, from the New York Public Library