Author: Glen

Here’s an inter­est­ing sto­ry from the New York Times: Research Around the World Links Reli­gion to Eco­nom­ic Devel­op­ment.

Intrigu­ing excerpts:

Since the Ger­man soci­ol­o­gist Max Weber wrote about the Protes­tant work eth­ic and the spir­it of cap­i­tal­ism, social sci­en­tists have argued that cul­ture — includ­ing reli­gious habits — is part of the com­plex mix that deter­mines a coun­try’s eco­nom­ic health. What dis­tin­guish­es the work of Mr. Bar­ro and Ms. McCleary, some schol­ars said, is that it uses a sophis­ti­cat­ed analy­sis of a huge set of data to quan­ti­fy the argu­ments of anthro­pol­o­gists, soci­ol­o­gists and polit­i­cal sci­en­tists.

…

As the cou­ple began their study, Ms. McCleary said, it was clear that the wide­ly dis­cussed sec­u­lar­iza­tion the­sis — the idea that a coun­try becomes more sec­u­lar as it becomes rich­er and more indus­tri­al­ized — did not apply to the Unit­ed States, one of the most reli­gious nations in the world.

And over the last 30 years, many East Asian coun­tries, includ­ing Malaysia, Sin­ga­pore and South Korea, have expe­ri­enced both rapid eco­nom­ic growth and the spread of Chris­tian­i­ty, Mr. Bar­ro said.

“South Korea is a good exam­ple of that rapid growth and more reli­gion,” he said. There the num­ber of con­verts from Con­fu­cian­ism and oth­er East­ern reli­gions to Chris­tian­i­ty is grow­ing rapid­ly, he explained.

Some of the low­est lev­els of reli­gios­i­ty were found in Chi­na and North Korea. The low­est lev­els of eco­nom­ic growth were in sub-Saha­ran African coun­tries. The for­mer East Ger­many (which includes Weber’s birth­place) was one of the low­est in both reli­gios­i­ty and growth.

Take heed, all you bud­ding nov­el­ists — Flan­nery O’Con­nor has shown the way! Read all about it in O’Con­nor v. the Antichrist.

A few quotes from O’Con­nor tak­en from the essay:

“If you live today you breathe in nihilism. In or out of the Church, it’s the gas you breathe. If I had­n’t had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the neces­si­ty of fight­ing it, I would be the stinkingest log­i­cal pos­i­tivist you ever saw right now.”

In her most famous state­ment about her work, she explained that “to the hard of hear­ing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and star­tling fig­ures.”

“All my sto­ries,” she wrote, “are about the action of grace on a char­ac­ter who is not very will­ing to sup­port it.”

O’Con­nor once wrote that “more than ever now it seems that the king­dom of heav­en has to be tak­en by vio­lence, or not at all. You have to push as hard as the age that push­es against you.”

Check out the essay (or at least check out some of O’Con­nor’s books).