Tomorrow’s Christian Science Monitor tackles the issue I know each one of my clients struggles with at one time or another: the morality of bankruptcy.

On one hand,

Christian personal finance guru Mary Hunt has a stern message for anyone considering bankruptcy: "It's absolutely legal, but it is not moral."

But on the other,

In Psalm 37, "the psalmist is talking about [cases where] borrowing money and not repaying it becomes a business strategy," says Gary Moore, a Christian investment adviser in Sarasota, Fla. By contrast, he says, single women should not worry about declaring bankruptcy, for instance, after using credit cards to feed their children.

"Those people ought to go to bed every night knowing that God has granted them debt relief," Moore says. "And they're not, because they hear this garbage [from antidebt Christians]. That's what Jesus called placing heavy burdens on his flock."

And then there's this, which only seems to cloud the conflict even more:

[I]f restoring good credit is the goal…. Creditors like to see a recent history of bankruptcy … because it usually means an applicant has poor spending habits, has no debts, and is ineligible for bankruptcy for another five to seven years. In short, this applicant stands to be a near-term cash cow for the creditor

While I am slightly comforted by Mr. Moore's support for single mothers struggling to put food on the table in an era when the price of groceries is slowly - and for now silently rising, they are not the only group of people struggling with debt. Moreover, people who end up filing bankruptcy are not usually doing so because they want to get themselves into debt all over again.

But perhaps more importantly, this morality debtate tends to ignore a more practical issue: the fundamental fairness of consumer credit agreements. I have often compared the credit card industry to the stereotypical loan shark. Loan sharks don't have TV commercials begging us to "live richly", asking us "what's in MY wallet" or cluttering our mailbox with unwanted solicitations enticing us with miles, points, bonus gifts and teaser rates.

"I must have paid [creditors] way over $20,000 for a $5,000 debt, [and k]nowing in my heart that I paid everybody that I owed the original amount plus a reasonable amount of interest, I don't feel any guilt about having filed bankruptcy. I wish I had done it a lot sooner."