Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism. By Kathryn Tanner
In many ways, human beings are defined by the stories they tell. Cultural shifts and historical epochs are marked by the eclipsing of one dominant narrative by another, yet, as Jacques Derrida opined, past narratives do not completely fade from memory but continue to haunt our collective imagination...
| Published in: | Journal of the American Academy of Religion |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Review |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
2021
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| In: |
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
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| Further subjects: | B
Book review
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | In many ways, human beings are defined by the stories they tell. Cultural shifts and historical epochs are marked by the eclipsing of one dominant narrative by another, yet, as Jacques Derrida opined, past narratives do not completely fade from memory but continue to haunt our collective imagination. At the heart of Kathryn Tanner’s challenging and insightful book, one finds a struggle between multiple competing narratives: (1) the story of capitalism replacing Christianity as the West’s foundational narrative, which Max Weber argued cannot be told without recounting the story of Protestantism; (2) the story of finance-dominated capitalism cannibalizing western capitalism to create an unsustainable and dystopian zero-sum game that even threatens planetary survival; and (3) the still small voice (1 Kings 19:12) of Tanner’s carefully crafted tale of a world not governed by the reductionist and ultimately inhuman language of exchange markets, profit-driven schemes, and the constant commodification of human labor. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4585 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: American Academy of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/jaarel/lfab035 |