Le triomphe de la raison de RODNEY STARK

Source : http://www.pvr-zone.ca/triomphe_raison.htm


Contrairement aux idées reçues, l'Europe a dominé le monde dès l'époque dite obscure du Moyen Âge. Pour expliquer cette domination, nous avons pris l'habitude de souligner ses avantages géographiques et démographiques. Pourtant, l'explication première réside dans la foi des Européens en la raison, dans l'engagement manifeste de l'Église sur la voie d'une théologie rationnelle qui a rendu possibles les progrès. Rodney Stark avance une idée révolutionnaire lorsqu'il affirme que le christianisme est directement responsable des percées intellectuelles, politiques, scientifiques et économiques les plus significatives du dernier millénaire. Lorsqu'il démontre que la théologie chrétienne en est la source même. Les autres grandes religions ont mis l'accent sur le mystère, l'obéissance et l'introspection.

Seul le christianisme s'est ouvert à la logique et à la pensée déductives comme moyens d'accès aux lumières, à la liberté et au progrès. Au Ve siècle déjà, saint Augustin célébrait le progrès théologique et « l'invention exubérante ». Le triomphe de la raison est une enquête multiforme et un incessant voyage entre l'Ancien et le Nouveau Monde, entre le passé et le présent. Rodney Stark y démontre avec vigueur que les valeurs qui nous sont les plus chères aujourd'hui - le progrès scientifique, le règne de la démocratie, la liberté des échanges et de la circulation des hommes et des idées - doivent largement leur universalité au christianisme vu comme une tradition grandiose dont nous sommes tous les héritiers.

Le triomphe du Christianisme : comment Jésus a conquis l'Ouest ?

The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion

More than 40 percent of the people on earth today are Christians, and their number is growing more rapidly than that of any other major faith. In The Triumph of Christianity, acclaimed religious and social historian Rodney Stark explains how an obscure Jewish sect became the largest, most thriving religion in the world.

In Stark’s groundbreaking book The Rise of Christianity, he examined the early success of Christianity and how it conquered Rome. Now, in this much-anticipated volume, Stark tells a far more extensive story, beginning with the religious and social situation prior to the birth of Jesus and continuing to the present.

As it moves through six historical eras, The Triumph of Christianity gets right to Christianity’s most pivotal and controversial moments—often turning them on their heads:

Christmas Eve surveys the religious situation within which Christianity began.

Christianizing the Empire looks at Jesus’s life and the formative days of the movement he inspired, explaining why Christianity was a reprieve from the miseries of daily life for so many.

Consolidating Christian Europe argues that Constantine’s conversion did the church a great deal of harm, examines the gradual demise of paganism, and clarifies the motives behind the Crusades.

Medieval Currents sheds new light on the misleadingly named “Dark Ages” and the essential role that faith played in the scientific revolution.

Christianity Divided examines two Roman Catholic “Churches”—the Church of Piety and the Church of Power—as they respond to the challenges of heresy, Luther’s Reformation, and the Spanish Inquisition.

New Worlds and Christian Growth considers the development of religious pluralism in the United States and the continuing vigor of Christianity worldwide, disproving the popular notion that religion must disappear to make room for modernity.

source: http://blog.beliefnet.com/aliteraryspirit/2011/11/the-triumph-of-christianity.html#ixzz1fmozMoCv

MONEY GREED GOD OF JAY RICHARDS

source : http://worthyofnotereviews.blogspot.com/search/label/theology


When I was fourteen, I was hired as an intern at for a public-policy think-tank based in Seattle. I was encouraged by my supervisor to pursue policy-related work, particularly in my area of expertise: economics. This is how I eventually came to work as an assistant for Dr. Jay Richards, one of the Vice Presidents, who was looking to develop an accessible book on economics.


"Money, Greed, and God" was first developed as an autobiography. Dr. Richards originally intended to cover the course of his life and how his thinking on economics developed from a youthful Christian Marxism to a more mature pro-market paradigm. This kind of content is retained in many of the chapters, but the overarching framework (the organizing principle) of the book is slightly different. Dr. Richards organizes the material around eight myths that Christians believe about capitalism and the market system. They are, in order:


1) The Nirvana Myth.

Many people, especially Christians, tend to contrast capitalism with an unrealizable utopian ideal, rather than with the actual alternatives. Everything is bound to fall short of paradise, so the point is irrelevant. What is relevant is what is actually achievable in this reality.

2) The Piety Myth.

Many people, especially Christians, tend to focus on the good intentions behind reforms rather than the actual outcomes. This is why the Greek philosophers understood prudence to be the centerpiece of wisdom: it's not enough to want to do good, it's vital that we understand how. There are many cases where the unintended consequences of economic reform were disastrous to all involved.

3) The Zero-Sum Game Myth.

Many people, especially Christians, have an aversion to capitalism grounded in an aversion to inequity. They understand competition to be fundamentally anti-Christian, for my gain would be your loss. Suffice it to say that this is predicated on a woefully inadequate understanding of how markets work and what 'economic value' actually means. This error is highly correlated to the next myth:

4) The Materialist Myth.

Many people, especially Christians, have this notion that wealth cannot be created but only transferred. In other words, the cake I have is the cake you can no longer eat. The zero-sum game fallacy is particularly pernicious because it either undermines our hope for economic production and thus creative progress, or it elevates greed as a practical necessity of the market.

5) The Greed Myth.

From the 1987 fairy tale "Wall Street," the mid-century Objectivist ramblings of Ayn Rand, and even Bernard Mandeville's 1714 "Fable of the Bees," many people in the modern West have this concept of capitalism as a greed-driven enterprise. Naturally, it hasn't helped the public understanding that even some defenders of capitalism admit as much and seek to defend it. Many people, especially Christians, have lost the foundational understanding of capitalism as a virtue-driven enterprise, predicated on the rule of law and on our ability to sympathize with others, so that we might understand their needs and supply what they demand.

6) The Usury Myth.

This is the more historical of the chapters, based on an ancient prejudice against money as an essentially sterile instrument. Unlike agricultural products, gold didn't grow -- more might be found, but there was only a finite quantity of it. Thus, the idea that money could be fruitful -- that it could create a return if loaned at interest -- struck many in the classical and medieval world as profoundly unnatural. When it became understood that money was itself a form of capital and thus was a means for production, the opprobrium against usury was gradually eliminated.

7) The Artsy Myth.

Though the title doesn't quite work, the concept is dead-on: many people, especially Christians, have a tendency to subsume economic policy to aesthetic considerations. This is the foundation for the many complaints against our 'consumerist' society, the accolades of the 'small is beautiful' movement, the contempt for large corporations, and the preference for organic food rather than agribusiness. There are legitimate arguments for each of these, but the reasons are often inspired by aesthetic judgment. This relates back to the first myth -- the idea that we can contrast modern capitalism with some utopian paradise -- since in many cases our consumerist culture developed as a means of more effectively distributing basic goods to everyone. Suburbs are better than slums, even if we no longer boast of quite so many mansions.

8) The Freeze-Frame Myth.

The chapter generally covers the idea of environmental stewardship, and is a really effective discussion of the issues in question. The myth itself is unfortunately quite common: many people, especially Christians, have a tendency to treat the present moment as a microcosm of the past and future. They forget that life is by natural dynamic, and both economy and ecology tend to have pretty effective safeguards against Armageddon. If the supply of oil starts running low, the price will rise and demand will drop, which will encourage alternative sources of energy. The same applies for most of the other apocalyptic predictions, from the "population bomb" of Malthus and Ehrlich, to the current cause célèbre of global warming/climate change.

Dr. Richards concludes the book with a brief discussion of how to optimize the market system, with emphasis on human virtues and human rights. He also adds a brief appendix correlating the "spontaneous order" of the market (cf. Friedrich Hayek) to the Providential understanding of the Christian God. This latter point actually appeared as the subject of one of my research articles.

"Money, Greed and God" is a splendid summary of economic thinking, and a warning call to those who are content with common misconceptions. The book is particularly well suited for Christians who are distressed by the "greed is good" school of libertarianism, and who are searching for an ethical defense of markets.

Full disclosure: for my research assistance in the early development of the book, I receive a brief mention in the Acknowledgements section of this book.

CITIES OF GOD DE RODNEY STARK : EGLISE PRIMITIVE, MOUVEMENT URBAIN ET MISSION

source : http://worthyofnotereviews.blogspot.com/2011/05/rodney-stark-cities-of-god.html

Rodney Stark: Cities of God



Mostly on a whim, I picked out another of his books, "Cities of God," on the urbanization of the early Christian church. The subtitle of the book reads: "The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome." I'm guessing Stark wasn't responsible for the subtitle, because his thesis is 1) Christianity began as an urban movement, and 2) Christianity didn't conquer anything.


Rodney Stark is a professor of Baylor University who specializes in the history and sociology of religion. He is best known as the author of "The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success," which is an unabashed defense of the Middle Ages as an deeply rational era. In "Cities of God," he tackles the question of Christianity's early spread, grounded in a statistical-sociological perspective.



Because the Roman Empire was moved primarily its urban centers, Stark limits his analysis to the thirty-three major cities with populations of 30,000 or more. He relies on statistical analysis to demonstrate that the spread of early Christian church wasn't driven primarily by mass conversions or even by the extraordinary work of the apostles (in contrast to early church historians like Eusebius), nor by violent anti-pagan riots under Constantine (in contrast to modern historians like Gibbons). Rather, Stark shows how the early Church grew at a gradual exponential rate, spreading along existing lines of social connectedness among the urban centers. Thus, he finds strong correlations between early Christian presence and the presence of Jewish populations and synagogues from the Diaspora. He also finds that the early Church was more likely to spread to Hellenic cities, as well as port cities around the Mediterranean, both of which comport nicely with historical expectation.

Stark uses the same data and statistical techniques for a number of other incidental claims. He argues that the early Christian faith was preceded in many of these urban centers by other "oriental" religions, particularly the cults of Cybele and Isis. He maintain a sharp distinction between these pagan faiths and Christian monotheism, but also demonstrates how the worship of Cybele and Isis predisposed Hellenic audiences towards accepting a One True God and thereby towards accepting the monotheistic claims of Christianity. Stark also argues that Paul's primary role was in traveling among existing congregations to encourage and exhort (and thus he was more of a conventional apostle than a pure evangelist), and that Paul's most effective outreach was not to the Gentiles but to the Hellenized Jews of the Diaspora. Both of these claims may be controversial, but I found his arguments compelling.

More pointedly against his brethren in the historical sciences, Stark makes a strong case against treating the Gnostics as preservation of "true Christianity," or even as a primarily "Christian" tradition in the first place. Drawing from similar sources of evidence, Stark demonstrates that most Gnostic "movements" were isolated intellectual heresies, and their spread was not organic (along known lines of sea travel, for instance), but among existing pagan communities. This chapter is probably the most relevant for modern historians, and the most effective in conveying the profound esoteric weirdness of much Gnostic thought. Stark also points out the general uselessness of "Gnosticism" as a category, and suggests more precise distinctions (such as "Demiurgism") for historical reference.

I personally enjoyed the final chapter ("The Last Days of Paganism") the most. It serves as a refreshing antidote both to the anti-Constantine fervor that grips the popular understanding of the period, thanks to Edward Gibbons' landmark (and famously anti-Christian) tome "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Stark's research further demolishes the hagiography surrounding Julian the Apostate, the last pagan Emperor who instigated anti-Christian riots and disrupted the uneasy peace that had been forged by Constantine. Stark also examines the Mithraic cult, concluding that it was a very minor phenomenon mostly limited to low-level frontier soldiers, and that its importance is grossly exaggerated by modern anti-Christian writers. Lastly, this chapter attempts to show that, despite the occasional imperial proclamation forbidding pagan rites, paganism declined gradually and enjoyed remarkable tolerance among the rising Christian elite.

I am not a professional historian, so I'm not in a position to offer a critique of "Cities of God." As an amateur social scientist, I'm not as convinced by his insistence that the historical sciences require a statistical foundation. All that same, Stark does show how such analysis could be useful and might drive historical discovery. In terms of the content, however, I found both Stark's analysis and conclusions to be insightful and thought-provoking. For anyone interested in the history of the early church, this work is highly recommended.