scholarly journals Sacramental Exchange: Eschatological Economy and Consumption Ritual

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 586
Author(s):  
Kimberly Belcher

Contemporary sacramental theology construes the sacraments as a symbolic gift exchange between God and humanity; God initiates in the ministry of Jesus Christ, and human beings acknowledge and respond to God’s gift. The gratuity of that initial gift is ensured not only by reference to God’s all-sufficient nature, but also in many cases by excising economic value and economic exchange from the symbolic realm within which the sacramental gift exchange proceeds. This poses an intellectual and a practical problem. Intellectually, economic exchange is fundamentally symbolic and even ritualistic, so that the division between them is difficult to define and maintain. Practically, economic behavior is morally relevant, and the sacraments ought to give some purchase on marketplace behavior. In this essay, anthropological and economic work on “consumption rituals,” based on the work of Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, is brought to bear on defining the relationship between sacraments and economic exchange and articulating the sociological preconditions for experiencing market exchange as an extension of sacramental gift exchange.

Author(s):  
Katherine Gillen

Chaste Value reassesses chastity’s significance in early modern drama, arguing that presentations of chastity inform the stage’s production of early capitalist subjectivity and social difference. Plays invoke chastity—itself a quasi-commodity—to interrogate the relationship between personal and economic value. The economic imagery surrounding chastity ranges from romantic evocations of treasure to more quotidian references to usury, counterfeiting, and commodity exchange. Attending to such discourse in late Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, Chaste Value argues that representations of chastity (married fidelity as well as virginity) figure centrally within the early modern theatre’s interrogation of early capitalism, particularly with regard to the incorporation of people into commercial exchange. Through chastity discourse, the stage disrupts pre-capitalist ideas of intrinsic value while also reallocating such value according to emerging hierarchies of gender, race, class, and nationality. Chastity, therefore, emerges as a central category within early articulations of humanity, determining who possesses intrinsic value and, conversely, whose bodies and labour can be incorporated into market exchange.


Author(s):  
T.J. Kasperbauer

This chapter applies the psychological account from chapter 3 on how we rank human beings above other animals, to the particular case of using mental states to assign animals moral status. Experiments on the psychology of mental state attribution are discussed, focusing on their implications for human moral psychology. The chapter argues that attributions of phenomenal states, like emotions, drive our assignments of moral status. It also describes how this is significantly impacted by the process of dehumanization. Psychological research on anthropocentrism and using animals as food and as companions is discussed in order to illuminate the relationship between dehumanization and mental state attribution.


Author(s):  
Christine M. Korsgaard

This book argues that we are obligated to treat all sentient animals as “ends in themselves.” Drawing on a theory of the good derived from Aristotle, it offers an explanation of why animals are the sorts of beings who have a good. Drawing on a revised version of Kant’s argument for the value of humanity, it argues that rationality commits us to claiming the standing of ends in ourselves in two senses. As autonomous beings, we claim to be ends in ourselves when we claim the standing to make laws for ourselves and each other. As beings who have a good, we also claim to be ends in ourselves when we take the things that are good for us to be good absolutely and so worthy of pursuit. The first claim commits us to joining with other autonomous beings in relations of reciprocal moral lawmaking. The second claim commits us to treating the good of every sentient animal as something of absolute importance. The book also argues that human beings are not more important than, superior to, or better off than the other animals. It criticizes the “marginal cases” argument and advances a view of moral standing as attaching to the atemporal subjects of lives. It offers a non-utilitarian account of the relationship between the good and pleasure, and addresses questions about the badness of extinction and about whether we have the right to eat animals, experiment on them, make them work for us, and keep them as pets.


Author(s):  
Rainer Forst

This chapter addresses the classical question of the relationship between enlightenment and religion. In doing so, the chapter compares Jürgen Habermas's thought to that of Pierre Bayle and Immanuel Kant. For, although Habermas undoubtedly stands in a tradition founded by Bayle and Kant, he develops a number of important orientations within this tradition and has changed his position in his recent work. The chapter studies this change to understand Habermas's position better. It also draws attention to a fundamental question raised by the modern world: what common ground can human reason establish in the practical and theoretical domain between human beings who are divided by profoundly different religious (including antireligious) views?


Author(s):  
William Wheeler

This chapter looks at a postsocialist fishery in Kazakhstan to explore the relationship between property rules designed to manage natural resources, and practices of resource exploitation. The Aral Sea is famous for its desiccation over the second half of the twentieth century, which stemmed from Soviet irrigation projects; in 2006 a World Bank/Republic of Kazakhstan project restored a small part of the sea, and fish catches have recently recovered somewhat. In this chapter, based on ethnographic and archival research, I explore the disjuncture between formal rules and practice to address debates about the management of common-pool resources. Within the nomadic economy, in contrast to livestock, fish were not property objects; over the colonial, Soviet and post-Soviet periods, they became objects of economic value in different ways, mediating different sorts of social relations. Turning to the contemporary property regime, I suggest that formal rules matter, but in unintended ways.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 80
Author(s):  
Muniyandi Balasubramanian

Forest ecosystem services have played a vital role in human well-being. Particularly, recreational ecosystem services are creating physical and mental well-being for human beings. Therefore, the main objective of the paper is to estimate the economic value of recreational ecosystem services provides by recreational sites such as Nandi Hills and Nagarhole National Park based on the individual travel cost method in Karnataka, India. This study has used a random sampling method for 300 tourist visitors to recreational sites. The present study has also estimated the consumer surplus of the visitors. The results of the study have found that (i) economic value of two creational sites has been estimated at US $323.05 million, (ii) the consumer surplus has been estimated for Nandi Hills at US $7.45 and Nagarhole National Park at US $3.16. The main implication of the study is to design the entry fees for the recreational site and sustainable utilization of recreational ecosystem services for the present and future generations.


SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 215824402110095
Author(s):  
Jakub Dostál

The economic value of volunteering is an increasingly important part of volunteering management. It has become part of public policies. Some requests for proposals (RFP) enable nonprofits to include the value of volunteer time in compulsory co-financing. These RFP include the European Economic Area (EEA) Grants and Norway Grants. This article addresses the relationship in the value of volunteering, also called in-kind volunteering contributions. The research includes two case studies of finances from EEA and Norway Grants in the Czech Republic: the Czech NGO Programme, responsible for allocating grants between 2009 and 2014, and the Active Citizens Fund, responsible for allocating grants between 2014 and 2021. They share elements through the EEA and Norway Grants rules. However, they use different types of specialist replacement wages. The article summarizes the arguments for including in-kind volunteering contributions. It presents the possible values of these contributions in the selected cases, including the relationship between the type of volunteering and the number of hours necessary to achieve these values. The article defines the theoretical basis for calculating the value of in-kind volunteer contributions and illustrates this with real examples of allocations from EEA and Norway Grants.


2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (8) ◽  
pp. 1262-1269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel F. Baskerville ◽  
Kerry Jacobs ◽  
Vassili Joannides de Lautour ◽  
Jeff Sissons

Purpose Accounting research has struggled with how ethnicity is to be understood in relation to concepts such as nation and nationality and how ethnicity may impact on accounting and auditing practices, behaviours, education and professional values. These themes are explored and developed in the papers presented in this special issue. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to explore the contrasting theoretical and methodological approaches reflected by the papers in the issue. Design/methodology/approach This is a reflective and analytical paper which explores how notions of ethnicity are conceived and operationalised in accounting research. The authors identified two distinctive analytic ordering processes evident within this AAAJ Special issue: Mary Douglas’ scheme of Grid and Group and the Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual tools of field, capital and habitus. Findings The “Grid and Group” Culture Theory with Bourdieu’s theoretical tools evident in the papers provide powerful tools to explore the relationship between ethnicity and accounting both conceptually and empirically, suggesting that ethnicity can be deployed to reveal and challenge institutionalised racism. This paper highlights the potential to integrate elements of the “Grid and Group” Culture Theory and Bourdieu’s theoretical tools. The issue of ethnicity and the relationship between ethnicity and accounting should be more fruitfully explored in future. Research limitations/implications The authors acknowledge the challenges and limitations of discussing the issue of ethnicity from any particular cultural perspective and recognise the implicit dominance of White Anglo centric perspectives within accounting research. Originality/value The papers presented in the special issue illustrate that the issue of ethnicity is complex and difficult to operationalise. This paper highlights the potential to move beyond the ad hoc application of theoretical and methodological concepts to operationalise coherent concepts which challenge and extend the authors’ understanding of accounting as a social and contextual practice. But to achieve this it is necessary to more clearly integrate theory, methodology, method and critique.


1994 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard W. Fulweiler

Our Mutual Friend, published just six years after Darwin's The Origin of Species, is structured on a Darwinian pattern. As its title hints, the novel is an account of the mutual-though hidden-relations of its characters, a fictional world of individuals seeking their own advantage, a "dismal swamp" of "crawling, creeping, fluttering, and buzzing creatures." The relationship between the two works is quite direct in light of the large number of reviews on science, evolution, and The Origin from 1859 through the early 1860s in Dicken's magazine, All the Year Round. Given the laissez-faire origin of the Origin, Dicken's use of it in a book directed against laissez-faire economics is ironic. Important Darwinian themes in the novel are predation, mutual relationships, chance, and, especially, inheritance, a central issue in both Victorian fiction and in The Origin of Species. The novel asks whether predatory self-seeking or generosity should be the desired inheritance for human beings. The victory of generosity is symbolized by a dying child's "willing" his inheritance of a toy Noah's Ark, "all the Creation," to another child. Our Mutual Friend is saturated with the motifs of Darwinian biology, therefore, to display their inadequacy. Although Dickens made use of the explanatory powers of natural selection and remained sympathetic to science, the novel transcends and opposes its Darwinian structure in order to project a teleological and designed evolution in the human world toward a moral community of responsible men and women.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 110-121
Author(s):  
Rivanti Muslimawaty

Many parents do not understand the concept of faith education inchildren. This could be based on an assumption that children are stilltoo young to be educated in matters of faith. Whereas the family, in thiscase the parents, is an educational institution that is directly related tothe child since he was born. So there is a thought that the family isbelieved to have a very strong influence on children’s religiouseducation. This happens because the relationship that exists betweenparents and children for 24 hours is very important in education.Zakiah Daradjat is an education expert who also believes that theimportance of faith education is given to children as early as possible,so the purpose of this study is to find out how Zakiah Daradjat’sthoughts about children’s religious education are in the family. Byusing qualitative research methods, the author seeks to explain theeducation of children’s faith in the family according to ZakiahDaradjat. The author found that Zakiah Daradjat had clear thoughtsabout children’s religious education in the family, which aims to makechildren as human beings, through the six pillars of faith, with methodsof exemplification, habituation, wrong correction, erroneous quarrelsthat occur and reminding the forgotten. The evaluations carried out inthe form of memorization tests, tests of understanding and practice ofworship. This makes Zakiah Daradjat’s thoughts still relevant to beapplied in today’s life and become a reference for psrents, teachers abdother related parties.


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