Download or read book Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism written by Kathryn Tanner and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the world’s most celebrated theologians argues for a Protestant anti-work ethicIn his classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber famously showed how Christian beliefs and practices could shape persons in line with capitalism. In this significant reimagining of Weber’s work, Kathryn Tanner provocatively reverses this thesis, arguing that Christianity can offer a direct challenge to the largely uncontested growth of capitalism.Exploring the cultural forms typical of the current finance-dominated system of capitalism, Tanner shows how they can be countered by Christian beliefs and practices with a comparable person-shaping capacity. Addressing head-on the issues of economic inequality, structural under- and unemployment, and capitalism’s unstable boom/bust cycles, she draws deeply on the theological resources within Christianity to imagine anew a world of human flourishing. This book promises to be one of the most important theological books in recent years.
Download or read book The New Spirit of Capitalism written by Luc Boltanski and published by Verso. This book was released on 2005 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A century after the publication of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism , a major new work examines network-based organization, employee autonomy and post-Fordist horizontal work structures.
Download or read book Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism written by Jonathan Tran and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Any serious consideration of Asian American life forces us to reframe the way we talk about racism and antiracism. The current emphasis on racial identity obscures the political economic basis that makes racialized life in America legible. This is especially true when it comes to Asian Americans. This book reframes the conversation in terms of what has been called ""racial capitalism"" and utilizes two extended case studies to show how Asian Americans perpetuate and resist its political economy.
Download or read book Water Christianity and the Rise of Capitalism written by Terje Oestigaard and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-03-22 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Christian religion is deeply imbued with the imagery of water, and water plays a central role in its religious practices, not least in baptism. Yet the wider role of water in Christianity has been little explored. In this pioneering book, Terje Oestigaard uses the dramatic changes that took place in perceptions of water during the Reformation to reveal the importance that water played in structuring society and religion in the post-Reformation period. Prior to the Reformation, most common people believed misfortune and catastrophe were caused by the devil, and sought protection in the use of holy water blessed by the local priest. Holy water and holy wells gave laypeople a powerful weapon which could be used to keep the devil away, cure illness and protect fields, property and family. But with the Reformation, the nature of holy water was challenged and belief in the efficacy of holy water and holy wells was attacked as Popish magic and superstition: the status of holy water became one of the main battlegrounds between Protestants and Catholics. The author explores these conflicting views on the spiritual qualities of water and their consequences for society at large. He traces the changing views of nature that arose with Enlightenment developments in the scientific understanding of water and the hydrological cycle, and shows how the emergence of a natural theology helped encourage a belief in the Protestant work ethic whereby wealth and economic success equated with religious excellence. The author concludes by examining - and challenging - Weber's claim that the protestant work ethic and capitalist spirit of enterprise that was so important to the later success of the Industrial Revolution came about when magic and superstition were eliminated from religion by the Reformation. The result is a highly original work that provides one of the most detailed explorations of the importance of the role of water in structuring society and religion in post-Reformation England. Offering fresh insights into the development of society and religion, it will be welcomed by all those with an interest in water, religion, sociology, and the Reformation period.
Download or read book Catholic Ethic and the Spirit Of Capitalism written by Michael and jana Novak and published by Free Press. This book was released on 2015-11-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an aged response to Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Michael Novak discusses how the powerful cultural influence Catholicism has had throughout the world is necessary in any vision of the future of capitalism. Drawing on the major works of modern Papal thought, The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism demonstrates how Catholic tradition has come to reflect a richer interpretation of capitalist culture. Novak offers an original and penetrating conception of social justice and applies a newly formulated notion of social activism to the urgent worldwide problem of ethnicity, race, and poverty. With this fresh rethinking of the Catholic ethic, Novak presents timely research that will challenge citizens in the West seeking a realistic, moral vision and those living in the two historically Catholic regions of the world—Eastern Europe and Latin America—as they take their first steps as market economies.
Download or read book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism written by Max Weber and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-04-19 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author's best-known and most controversial study relates the rise of a capitalist economy to the Puritan belief that hard work and good deeds were outward signs of faith and salvation.
Download or read book Capitalism and Christianity American Style written by William E. Connolly and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-09 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capitalism and Christianity, American Style is William E. Connolly’s stirring call for the democratic left to counter the conservative stranglehold over American religious and economic culture in order to put egalitarianism and ecological integrity on the political agenda. An eminent political theorist known for his work on identity, secularism, and pluralism, Connolly charts the path of the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine,” source of a bellicose ethos reverberating through contemporary institutional life. He argues that the vengeful vision of the Second Coming motivating a segment of the evangelical right resonates with the ethos of greed animating the cowboy sector of American capitalism. The resulting evangelical-capitalist ethos finds expression in church pulpits, Fox News reports, the best-selling Left Behind novels, consumption practices, investment priorities, and state policies. These practices resonate together to diminish diversity, forestall responsibility to future generations, ignore urban poverty, and support a system of extensive economic inequality. Connolly describes how the evangelical-capitalist machine works, how its themes resound across class lines, and how it infiltrates numerous aspects of American life. Proposing changes in sensibility and strategy to challenge this machine, Connolly contends that the liberal distinction between secular public and religious private life must be reworked. Traditional notions of unity or solidarity must be translated into drives to forge provisional assemblages comprised of multiple constituencies and creeds. The left must also learn from the political right how power is infused into everyday institutions such as the media, schools, churches, consumption practices, corporations, and neighborhoods. Connolly explores the potential of a “tragic vision” to contest the current politics of existential resentment and political hubris, explores potential lines of connection between it and theistic faiths that break with the evangelical right, and charts the possibility of forging an “eco-egalitarian” economy. Capitalism and Christianity, American Style is William E. Connolly’s most urgent work to date.
Download or read book Economy of Grace written by Kathryn Tanner and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are there any fair and viable alternatives to global capitalism? University of Chicago theologian Kathryn Tanner offers here a serious and creative proposal for evaluating economic theory and behavior through a theological lens.
Download or read book Just Capitalism written by Brent Waters and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2016-10-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just Capitalism is a Christian moral defense of economic globalization as a system that is well-suited to provide the necessary material needs that are prerequisite for human community and flourishing. Global-based market exchange offers the development and distribution of the goods of creation for humans to enjoy and share. Globalization also offers "the most realistic and promising way of exercising a preferential option for the poor." Waters argues that economic globalization, and thus capitalism, is a necessary condition for sustaining human life but not a sufficient condition for enabling human flourishing. Even though globalization is generally compatible with Christian theological and moral claims and can realistically facilitate the well-being of the human family, it must be reoriented toward koinoniahuman community, communication, fellowshipas the global economy's primary goal in order to help actualize human flourishing. Readers will gain insight about how economic globalization (and thus capitalism) is good for the human family and can be made better by certain reorientations that are compatible with Christian moral values. Waters provides a mature and civil counterargument against knee-jerk condemnations of economic globalization and capitalism.
Download or read book The Enchantments of Mammon written by Eugene McCarraher and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An extraordinary work of intellectual history as well as a scholarly tour de force, a bracing polemic, and a work of Christian prophecy...McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work.” —The Observer At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the “disenchantment” of the world, stripping material objects and social relations of their mystery and magic. In this magisterial work, Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether one is prepared to acknowledge it or not. First flowering in the fields and factories of England and brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals, whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit, capitalism has become so thoroughly enmeshed in the fabric of our society that our faith in “the market” has become sacrosanct. Informed by cultural history and theology as well as management theory, The Enchantments of Mammon looks to nineteenth-century Romantics, whose vision of labor combined reason, creativity, and mutual aid, for salvation. In this impassioned challenge to some of our most firmly held assumptions, McCarraher argues that capitalism has hijacked our intrinsic longing for divinity—and urges us to break its hold on our souls. “A majestic achievement...It is a work of great moral and spiritual intelligence, and one that invites contemplation about things we can’t afford not to care about deeply.” —Commonweal “More brilliant, more capacious, and more entertaining, page by page, than his most ardent fans dared hope. The magnitude of his accomplishment—an account of American capitalism as a religion...will stun even skeptical readers.” —Christian Century
Download or read book The Victory of Reason written by Rodney Stark and published by Random House. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many books have been written about the success of the West, analyzing why Europe was able to pull ahead of the rest of the world by the end of the Middle Ages. The most common explanations cite the West’s superior geography, commerce, and technology. Completely overlooked is the fact that faith in reason, rooted in Christianity’s commitment to rational theology, made all these developments possible. Simply put, the conventional wisdom that Western success depended upon overcoming religious barriers to progress is utter nonsense.In The Victory of Reason, Rodney Stark advances a revolutionary, controversial, and long overdue idea: that Christianity and its related institutions are, in fact, directly responsible for the most significant intellectual, political, scientific, and economic breakthroughs of the past millennium. In Stark’s view, what has propelled the West is not the tension between secular and nonsecular society, nor the pitting of science and the humanities against religious belief. Christian theology, Stark asserts, is the very font of reason: While the world’s other great belief systems emphasized mystery, obedience, or introspection, Christianity alone embraced logic and reason as the path toward enlightenment, freedom, and progress. That is what made all the difference.In explaining the West’s dominance, Stark convincingly debunks long-accepted “truths.” For instance, by contending that capitalism thrived centuries before there was a Protestant work ethic–or even Protestants–he counters the notion that the Protestant work ethic was responsible for kicking capitalism into overdrive. In the fifth century, Stark notes, Saint Augustine celebrated theological and material progress and the institution of “exuberant invention.” By contrast, long before Augustine, Aristotle had condemned commercial trade as “inconsistent with human virtue”–which helps further underscore that Augustine’s times were not the Dark Ages but the incubator for the West’s future glories. This is a sweeping, multifaceted survey that takes readers from the Old World to the New, from the past to the present, overturning along the way not only centuries of prejudiced scholarship but the antireligious bias of our own time. The Victory of Reason proves that what we most admire about our world–scientific progress, democratic rule, free commerce–is largely due to Christianity, through which we are all inheritors of this grand tradition.
Download or read book Protestantism and Capitalism written by Jere Cohen and published by Aldine De Gruyter. This book was released on 2002 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each of the hypotheses that Jere Cohen finds in Weber's text represents a potential mechanism through which Puritanism could have exerted its econmic influence. The aim of the book as a whole is to determine how Puritanism exerted its influence on capitalism, how many mechanisms were at work and how powerful the impact might actually have been.
Download or read book Christ the Key written by Kathryn Tanner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative Christ-centered theology exploring the centrality of Christ for Christian thought and shedding fresh light on major theological issues.
Download or read book Theology of Money written by Philip Goodchild and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-22 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theology of Money is a philosophical inquiry into the nature and role of money in the contemporary world. Philip Goodchild reveals the significance of money as a dynamic social force by arguing that under its influence, moral evaluation is subordinated to economic valuation, which is essentially abstract and anarchic. His rigorous inquiry opens into a complex analysis of political economy, encompassing markets and capital, banks and the state, class divisions, accounting practices, and the ecological crisis awaiting capitalism. Engaging with Christian theology and the thought of Carl Schmitt, Georg Simmel, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, and many others, Goodchild develops a theology of money based on four contentions, which he elaborates in depth. First, money has no intrinsic value; it is a promise of value, a crystallization of future hopes. Second, money is the supreme value in contemporary society. Third, the value of assets measured by money is always future-oriented, dependent on expectations about how much might be obtained for those assets at a later date. Since this value, when realized, will again depend on future expectations, the future is forever deferred. Financial value is essentially a degree of hope, expectation, trust, or credit. Fourth, money is created as debt, which involves a social obligation to work or make profits to repay the loan. As a system of debts, money imposes an immense and irresistible system of social control on individuals, corporations, and governments, each of whom are threatened by economic failure if they refuse their obligations to the money system. This system of debt has progressively tightened its hold on all sectors and regions of global society. With Theology of Money, Goodchild aims to make conscious our collective faith and its dire implications.
Download or read book The Money Cult written by Chris Lehmann and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A grand and startling work of American history America was founded, we’re taught in school, by the Pilgrims and other Puritans escaping religious persecution in Europe—an austere and pious lot who established a culture that remained pure and uncorrupted until the Industrial Revolution got in the way. In The Money Cult, Chris Lehmann reveals that we have it backward: American capitalism has always been entangled with religion, and so today’s megapastors, for example, aren’t an aberration—they’re as American as Benjamin Franklin. Tracing American Christianity from John Winthrop to the rise of the Mormon Church and on to the triumph of Joel Osteen, The Money Cult is an ambitious work of history from a widely admired journalist. Examining nearly four hundred years of American history, Lehmann reveals how America’s religious leaders became less worried about sin and the afterlife and more concerned with the material world, until the social gospel was overtaken by the gospel of wealth. Showing how American Christianity came to accommodate—and eventually embrace—the pursuit of profit, as well as the inescapability of economic inequality, The Money Cult is a wide-ranging and revelatory book that will make you rethink what you know about the form of American capitalism so dominant in the world today, as well as the core tenets of America itself.
Download or read book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism written by Michael Novak and published by . This book was released on 2015-05-18 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 30 years after the release of his ground-breaking work, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Michael Novak returns to answer the question of what gives rise to democratic capitalism - that intricate blend of commerce and rule of law that encourages peace and global trade. This essay is vital to understanding the intangible environment that best inspires human flourishing, as it discovers capitalism's essence, and uncovers what truly fosters creativity.Novak articulates how democratic capitalism works toward creating, not just consuming, wealth, along with encouraging ambition, discipline, and mutual benefit. He explains how critics fail to consider the interaction between the system and the role that economic, political, and moral liberties play in comprehensive human flourishing.This new and exciting work enlivens the connection between the Bible and democratic capitalism by showcasing how seamlessly the dynamic polity fits with the imperatives of human capacity and drive.
Download or read book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Sport written by Steven J. Overman and published by Mercer University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steven Overman explores the concordant values of the Protestant ethic, capitalism, and sport by applying German scholar Max Weber's seminal thesis. Weber demonstrated a relationship between the Protestant ethic and a form of economic behavior he labeled the ôcalling of capitalism.ö
