I’m an economist, now in my fiftieth year as a professor at Harvard. While much of my work has focused on economic policy – questions like the effects of government budget deficits, guidelines for the conduct of U.S. monetary policy, and what actions to take in response to a banking or more general financial crisis – in recent years I’ve also addressed broader issues surrounding the connections between economics and society. Several years ago, in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, I examined the implications of our economy’s growth, or stagnation, for the social, political, and ultimately moral character of our society. My most recent book explores the connections between economic thinking and religious thinking.
The conventional view of the origins of modern Western economics portrays the subject as a product of the Enlightenment, having nothing to do with religion. On the contrary, I think religion exerted a powerful influence from the outset. I show that the foundational transition in thinking about what we now call economics, beginning in the eighteenth century, was decisively shaped by what were then hotly contended lines of religious thought within the English-speaking Protestant world. Beliefs about God-given human character, about the after-life, and about the purpose of our existence, were all under scrutiny in the world in which Adam Smith and his contemporaries lived. I also show that these long-standing influences of religious thinking on economic thinking help explain the sometimes puzzling behavior of so many of our fellow citizens today whose views about economic policies – and whose voting behavior too – seem sharply at odds with what would be to their own economic benefit.
Everyone knows that the Puritans settled in Boston and the Quakers settled in Philadelphia. What I found surprising is Baltzell’s argument that the two cities’ founding religions shaped their respective character for hundreds of years afterward. And, he says, the difference between Puritanism and Quakerism explains why Boston and Philadelphia played such different roles in American history.
Based on the biographies of some three hundred people in each city, this book shows how such distinguished Boston families as the Adamses, Cabots, Lowells, and Peabodys have produced many generations of men and women who have made major contributions to the intellectual, educational, and political life of their state and nation. At the same time, comparable Philadelphia families such as the Biddles, Cadwaladers, Ingersolls, and Drexels have contributed far fewer leaders to their state and nation. From the days of Benjamin Franklin and Stephen Girard down to the present, what leadership there has been in Philadelphia has largely been…
Bell, one of the greatest sociologists of the twentieth century, argues that having the right culture is essential for capitalism (or any other economic or political system) to flourish – and I certainly agree. But he goes further: he worries that over time the economic gains that capitalism delivers end up undermining the cultural conditions that allow capitalism to flourish in the first place. His book is about the role of culture more broadly, not religion in particular, but religion certainly fits within the overall argument.
With a new afterword by the author, this classic analysis of Western liberal capitalist society contends that capitalism,and the culture it creates,harbors the seeds of its own downfall by creating a need among successful people for personal gratification,a need that corrodes the work ethic that led to their success in the first place. With the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a new world order, this provocative manifesto is more relevant than ever.
One of the most significant episodes in the influence of religious thinking on economic thinking in America was the emergence of the Social Gospel, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. And one of the most powerful advocates of the Social Gospel was the Baptist minister and university theologian Walter Rauschenbusch. Evans’s biography vividly tells the story of the Social Gospel movement as well as Rauschenbusch’s leading role within it. Of the many clergymen about whom I write about in my own book, Rauschenbusch is perhaps the one whose ideas I most admire.
Given the 2005 Award of Merit by Christianity Today, Christopher Evans' The Kingdom is Always but Coming follows the life and career of American theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, the preeminent spokesperson at the center of the social gospel movement. Perceptive, well-informed, and ably written, Evans' biography is a superb introduction to both Rauschenbusch's life and his thought.
A classic book by one of our country’s most eminent historians, The Age of Reform traces the interplay between American politics and the clashing forces within American society from the time of Jefferson to the time of Franklin Roosevelt. In between, the great social movements – pro-and anti-slavery, populism, progressivism, the New Deal – all play out on a vast canvas. Religion is not the centerpiece of Hofstadter’s narrative, but it’s there throughout, sometimes on stage and at other times in the background. I’ve been recommending this book to my students for years.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author and preeminent historian comes a landmark in American political thought that examines the passion for progress and reform during 1890 to 1940.
The Age of Reform searches out the moral and emotional motives of the reformers the myths and dreams in which they believed, and the realities with which they had to compromise.
Why do some economies prosper while others seem never to make progress? Landes’s book – with its title a deliberate echo of Adam Smith’s famous work – emphasizes the role of culture in either enabling or retarding productive economic activity, throughout history and across the world. What Landes has in mind is culture in the broadest sense, including our most fundamental presumptions about human relations and the human condition. That, of course, means religion too. Some years ago, reviewing someone else’s book for The New York Times, I referred to David Landes as “a living national treasure if there ever was one.” Alas, Landes is no longer living, but I stand by that assessment.
Now that the old division of the world into the two power blocs of East and West has subsided, the great gap in wealth and health that separates North and South remains the single greatest problem and danger facing the world of the Third Millennium. The only challenge of comparable scope and difficulty is the threat of the environmental deterioration, and the two are intimately connected, indeed are one. David Landes argues that the North-South division is the great drama of our times, and that drama implies tension, passion, conflict and disappointment as well as happy outcomes. While Landes does…
Pete is content living a simple life in the remote Montana town of Sleeping Grass, driving the local garbage truck with his pot-bellied pig Pearl and wondering about what could've been. Elderly widow Wilma is busy meddling in Pete's life to try and make up for past wrongs that he knows nothing about. Yet.
When the sister Pete was separated from as a child shows up, Pete must confront a past he buried long ago, and Wilma discovers her long-awaited chance at redemption may cost more than she’s willing to pay.
For the first time in his life, Pete has everything to lose.
After years of drifting, fifty-year-old Pete Ryman has settled down with his potbellied pig, Pearl, in the small Montana town of Sleeping Grass--a place he never expected to see again. It's not the life he dreamed of, but there aren't many prospects for a high-school dropout like him.
Elderly widow Wilma Jacobsen carries a burden of guilt over her part in events that led to Pete leaving Sleeping Grass decades ago. Now that he's back, she's been praying for the chance to make things right, but she never…
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