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 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 Green Swans written by John Elkington and published by Greenleaf Book Group. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even leading capitalists admit that capitalism is broken. Green Swans is a manifesto for system change designed to serve people, planet, and prosperity. In his twentieth book, John Elkington—dubbed the “Godfather of Sustainability”—explores new forms of capitalism fit for the twenty-first century. If Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “Black Swans” are problems that can take us exponentially toward breakdown, then “Green Swans” are solutions that take us exponentially toward breakthrough. The success—and survival—of humanity now depends on how we rein in the first and accelerate the second. Green Swans draws on Elkington’s firsthand experience in some of the world’s best-known boardrooms and C-suites. Using case studies, real-world examples, and profiles on emergent technologies, Elkington shows how the weirdest “Ugly Ducklings” of today’s world may turn into tomorrow’s world-saving Green Swans. This book is a must-read for business leaders in corporations great and small who want to help their businesses survive the coming shift in global priorities over the next decade and expand their horizons from responsibility, through resilience, and onto regeneration.
Download or read book Water and Society written by Terje Tvedt and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the central importance that water has held for civilizations both ancient and modern, its social significance has made surprisingly little impact on our contemporary understanding of human history and development. Dominant interpretations of the relationship between society and nature have remained water blind. In Water and Society historian and leading water expert Terje Tvedt argues for a change that acknowledges the significant role played by water in societal development. Reflecting his expertise as a geographer, historian and a political scientist, and drawing on his wide experience of water issues around the world, Terje Tvedt s Water and Society provides a long overdue reappraisal of the relationship between water and society, one that gives water its rightful place as central to any true understanding of human history and development."
Download or read book The Religious Nile written by Terje Oestigaard and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-07-30 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nile is arguably the most famous river in the world. For millennia, the search for its source defeated emperors and explorers. Yet the search for its source also contained a religious quest - a search for the origin of its divine and life-giving waters. Terje Oestigaard reveals how the beliefs associated with the river have played a key role in the cultural development and make-up of the societies and civilizations associated with it. Drawing upon his personal experience and fieldwork in Africa, including details of rites and ceremonies now fast disappearing, the author brings out in rich detail the religious and spiritual meanings attached to the life-giving waters by those whose lives are so bound to the river. Part religious quest, part exploration narrative, the author shows how this mighty river is a powerful source for a greater understanding of human nature, society and religion.
Download or read book Sacred Waters written by Celeste Ray and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describing sacred waters and their associated traditions in over thirty countries and across multiple time periods, this book identifies patterns in panhuman hydrolatry. Supplying life’s most basic daily need, freshwater sources were likely the earliest sacred sites, and the first protected and contested resource. Guarded by taboos, rites and supermundane forces, freshwater sources have also been considered thresholds to otherworlds. Often associated also with venerated stones, trees and healing flora, sacred water sources are sites of biocultural diversity. Addressing themes that will shape future water research, this volume examines cultural perceptions of water’s sacrality that can be employed to foster resilient human–environmental relationships in the growing water crises of the twenty-first century. The work combines perspectives from anthropology, archaeology, classics, folklore, geography, geology, history, literature and religious studies.
Download or read book The Source of the Blue Nile written by Gedef Abawa Firew and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-09-26 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethiopia has a rich and fascinating cultural heritage structured around water. The River Nile has been seen by many as the most important river in the world, and the secrets of the sources of the Nile and their mysteries have, from the dawn of civilization, attracted philosophers, emperors and explorers searching for answers. The source of the Blue Nile, Gish Abay, is believed to be the outlet of the biblical river Gihon, flowing directly from Paradise, linking this world with Heaven. The holiness of Abay (the Blue Nile) and its source in particular still has an important role in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. In the Lake Tana region, there are also numerous other myths, traditions and rituals concerning the river. Several of the island monasteries are incredibly holy, and indigenous practices and sacrifices to the river are still conducted. The most important celebration in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is the Timkat festival, which is an annual commemoration of the importance of baptism. Despite the importance of the River Nile from antiquity to present-day practices and beliefs in Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, very little research has been conducted on the cultural and religious aspects of the Blue Nile in general and its source, Gish Abay, and Lake Tana in Ethiopia in particular. This book combines historic sources and new empirical ethnography, presenting parts of this cultural heritage and the traditions of water along the Blue Nile.
Download or read book Religion at Work in Globalised Traditions written by Anders Kaliff and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-03-26 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do traditions disappear? How is the disappearance of tradition also a vehicle for social change and re-inventions of practices and new traditions? Using case studies from one Sukuma area along the southern shores of Lake Victoria in Tanzania, global processes of how religions work in practice are analysed by focusing on rainmaking, witchcraft and Christianity. Traditionally, Sukuma society was culturally and cosmologically structured around the chief, the ancestors and rainmaking. Everything was dependent upon the rain. Rainmaking as a ritual practice has disappeared and ancestral propitiations are declining, while, at the same time, Christianity is spreading and witchcraft and witch killings are increasing. Although Christianity as a religion may provide answers and hopes for life after death, the religion provides few solutions in the here and now when it comes to poverty and suffering; problems and challenges that have to be solved. Witchcraft, on the other hand, does, or is believed to do so – and the increase in witchcraft is analysed in relation to the impacts of more than a century of globalisation from the missionaries and colonizers onwards. With the declining ancestral tradition, witchcraft and Christianity as religious practices supplement each other in the ways they are believed to work in providing answers, solutions or divine interferences in different realms; this world and the Otherworld. Offering an approach going beyond structural functionalism on different premises, the book’s focus on religion at work will facilitate new understandings of how to study religion as it is perceived and believed in practice.
Download or read book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism written by Richard Henry Tawney and published by . This book was released on 1926 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Law and the Rise of Capitalism written by Michael Tigar and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2000-06 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tigar (Washington College of Law, American U.) has written a new introduction and extended afterword that update this Marxist analysis of law and jurisprudence, originally published in 1977. The study traces the role of law and lawyers in the rise of the European bourgeoisie. The new material discusses human rights issues and social movements over the past two decades, including political prisoners and the death penalty. c. Book News Inc.
Download or read book The Doctrine of Creation written by Bruce Riley Ashford and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to Bruce Ashford and Craig Bartholomew, one of the best sources for regaining a robust, biblical doctrine of creation is the recovery of Dutch neo-Calvinism. Tracing historical treatments and exploring theological themes, Ashford and Bartholomew develop the Kuyperian tradition's rich resources on creation for systematic theology and the life of the church today.
Download or read book Capitalism and the Jews written by Jerry Z. Muller and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-04 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the fate of the Jews has been shaped by the development of capitalism The unique historical relationship between capitalism and the Jews is crucial to understanding modern European and Jewish history. But the subject has been addressed less often by mainstream historians than by anti-Semites or apologists. In this book Jerry Muller, a leading historian of capitalism, separates myth from reality to explain why the Jewish experience with capitalism has been so important and complex—and so ambivalent. Drawing on economic, social, political, and intellectual history from medieval Europe through contemporary America and Israel, Capitalism and the Jews examines the ways in which thinking about capitalism and thinking about the Jews have gone hand in hand in European thought, and why anticapitalism and anti-Semitism have frequently been linked. The book explains why Jews have tended to be disproportionately successful in capitalist societies, but also why Jews have numbered among the fiercest anticapitalists and Communists. The book shows how the ancient idea that money was unproductive led from the stigmatization of usury and the Jews to the stigmatization of finance and, ultimately, in Marxism, the stigmatization of capitalism itself. Finally, the book traces how the traditional status of the Jews as a diasporic merchant minority both encouraged their economic success and made them particularly vulnerable to the ethnic nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Providing a fresh look at an important but frequently misunderstood subject, Capitalism and the Jews will interest anyone who wants to understand the Jewish role in the development of capitalism, the role of capitalism in the modern fate of the Jews, or the ways in which the story of capitalism and the Jews has affected the history of Europe and beyond, from the medieval period to our own.
Download or read book 23 Things They Don t Tell You about Capitalism written by Ha-Joon Chang and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-01-02 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER "For anyone who wants to understand capitalism not as economists or politicians have pictured it but as it actually operates, this book will be invaluable."-Observer (UK) If you've wondered how we did not see the economic collapse coming, Ha-Joon Chang knows the answer: We didn't ask what they didn't tell us about capitalism. This is a lighthearted book with a serious purpose: to question the assumptions behind the dogma and sheer hype that the dominant school of neoliberal economists-the apostles of the freemarket-have spun since the Age of Reagan. Chang, the author of the international bestseller Bad Samaritans, is one of the world's most respected economists, a voice of sanity-and wit-in the tradition of John Kenneth Galbraith and Joseph Stiglitz. 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism equips readers with an understanding of how global capitalism works-and doesn't. In his final chapter, "How to Rebuild the World," Chang offers a vision of how we can shape capitalism to humane ends, instead of becoming slaves of the market.
Download or read book How the West Won written by Rodney Stark and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-07-11 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finally the Truth about the Rise of the West Modernity developed only in the West—in Europe and North America. Nowhere else did science and democracy arise; nowhere else was slavery outlawed. Only Westerners invented chimneys, musical scores, telescopes, eyeglasses, pianos, electric lights, aspirin, and soap. The question is, Why? Unfortunately, that question has become so politically incorrect that most scholars avoid it. But acclaimed author Rodney Stark provides the answers in this sweeping new look at Western civilization. How the West Won demonstrates the primacy of uniquely Western ideas—among them the belief in free will, the commitment to the pursuit of knowledge, the notion that the universe functions according to rational rules that can be discovered, and the emphasis on human freedom and secure property rights. Taking readers on a thrilling journey from ancient Greece to the present, Stark challenges much of the received wisdom about Western history. Stark also debunks absurd fabrications that have flourished in the past few decades: that the Greeks stole their culture from Africa; that the West’s “discoveries” were copied from the Chinese and Muslims; that Europe became rich by plundering the non-Western world. At the same time, he reveals the woeful inadequacy of recent attempts to attribute the rise of the West to purely material causes—favorable climates, abundant natural resources, guns and steel. How the West Won displays Rodney Stark’s gifts for lively narrative history and making the latest scholarship accessible to all readers. This bold, insightful book will force you to rethink your understanding of the West and the birth of modernity—and to recognize that Western civilization really has set itself apart from other cultures.
Download or read book One Nation Under God written by Kevin M. Kruse and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2015-04-14 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The provocative and authoritative history of the origins of Christian America in the New Deal era We're often told that the United States is, was, and always has been a Christian nation. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse reveals that the belief that America is fundamentally and formally Christian originated in the 1930s. To fight the "slavery" of FDR's New Deal, businessmen enlisted religious activists in a campaign for "freedom under God" that culminated in the election of their ally Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. The new president revolutionized the role of religion in American politics. He inaugurated new traditions like the National Prayer Breakfast, as Congress added the phrase "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance and made "In God We Trust" the country's first official motto. Church membership soon soared to an all-time high of 69 percent. Americans across the religious and political spectrum agreed that their country was "one nation under God." Provocative and authoritative, One Nation Under God reveals how an unholy alliance of money, religion, and politics created a false origin story that continues to define and divide American politics to this day.
Download or read book A World without Capitalism written by Christian W. Chun and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Christian W. Chun examines the ways in which identities, discourses, and topographies of both capitalist and anti-capitalist imaginaries and realities are embodied in the everyday practices of people. A World without Capitalism? is a sociolinguistic ethnography that explores the heretofore limited research in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics on the discursive and materialized representations and enactments of capitalism. Engaging across disciplinary fields, including applied linguistics, ethnography, political economy, philosophy, and cultural studies, Chun investigates in ethnographic detail how capitalism does and does not pervade people’s everyday experiences. This book aims to further contribute to a much-needed understanding of how discourses operate in the co-constructions of capitalist and anti-capitalist imaginaries and instantiated realities and practices as narrated, lived, and embodied by people and material artifacts. This book is vital reading for students and researchers working in the fields of applied linguistics, discourse analysis, and cultural studies, as well as those interested in understanding capitalism and questioning how to live beyond it.
