Challenging Religious Studies

John Atherton

Description

This book represents a breakthrough in our understanding and development of the practices, ethics and theories of religious studies through engagement with the world of daily life and its breath-taking transformation since 1800, as revealed particularly in living standards, life expectancy and subjective wellbeing.

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 31 octobre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334053385
• Langue: English

Extrait

Challenging Religious Studies
The Wealth, Wellbeing and Inequalities of Nations
John Atherton






© John Atherton 2014
Published in 2014 by SCM Press
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
978 0 334 04649 3
Typeset by Regent Typesetting
Printed and bound by Lightning Source UK





To Princeton, Uppsala and Chester




Contents
Acknowledgements

1. ‘That They Might Have Life, And Have It More Abundantly’: The Argument Emerges
Part 1 Getting Better-ish
2. Great Escapes and Divergences
3. ‘I Came That They Might Have Life’: Christianity and Wellbeing
Part 2 Getting Better-ish in Historical Contexts. Putting Christianity to Work on Progressive Change
4. A Nation Under God: The American Case Study
5. An Ecclesiastical History of the English Peoples’ Journey to Greater Wellbeing: The British Case Study

Afterword: On Living in More Than One Place at Once
Bibliography
Acknowledgements of Sources




Acknowledgements
Producing this book has been a gradual process of development going back nearly ten years. A grant from two Research Councils, Arts and Humanities, and Economic and Social, enabled us to build a network of scholars to explore, from 2007 to 2009, the relationship between wellbeing studies and religion, producing the volume The Practices of Happiness: Political Economy, Religion and Wellbeing (2011). Interestingly, this was published by Routledge in its ‘Frontiers of Political Economy’ series, reflecting my lifelong interest in religion and economics. The material in this book goes way beyond that research and became focused on the subject of the Wealth and Wellbeing of Nations, the title of a splendid seminar run by that most creative Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton. Much of this book therefore owes a great deal to its director, Professor Will Storrar, who invited me to pursue my research there as the William Scheide Fellow in Theology in April 2013. This visit widened out, as they invariably and creatively do, and was deeply enriched by a conversation with Angus Deaton, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Economics Department at Princeton University. As a result much of the shape of and research behind Chapter 2 of this book owes a great deal to his seminal The Great Escape: Health, Wealth and the Origins of Inequality (2013), the text of which he kindly shared with me before publication. But the feast at Princeton became even more bountiful, through research conversations with Ellen Charry, the Margaret W. Harmon Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Her guidance on further reading in biblical studies and systematic theology, particularly in relation to the psychological dimensions of wellbeing, was of great importance for my work.
The core of this book is in Part 1 with its model for connecting Christianity with the economics and psychology of wellbeing. This was developed through a paper ‘The Wealth and Wellbeing of Nations: Lutheran–Anglican contributions to future directions for Christianity and political economy’ given at the conference ‘Remembering the Past – Living the Future. Lutheran Traditions in Transition’ at the University of Uppsala in October 2013 and at a research seminar at the Department of Theology at the University through the kind invitation of my friends and colleagues Professors Grenholm and Namli and then at Stockholm Cathedral through the courtesy of the Dean. The core of Part 2 was published in the International Journal of Public Theology on ‘Public Mission for Changing Times: Models for Progressive Change from American and British Experience’. I have significantly developed this material in this book, including using a relevant section from my Public Theology for Changing Times (2000). In terms of commissioning and seeing the book through the press, I am very grateful to Dr Natalie Watson of SCM Press. This is the second book she has sorted out for me!
I need to add to these debts of gratitude some more personal ones. To my colleagues at the William Temple Foundation, and particularly Chris Baker and John Reader, because after 40 years I continue to find it a creative and stimulating home, as I do the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, at the University of Chester. The latter honoured me with a Visiting Professorship in Religion, Ethics and Economics. My first public lecture ‘All Shall Be Well. Religion and Progressive Change’ in 2010 provided the stimulus and some of the framework of this book. But these acknowledgements get rightly and increasingly into my personal life, for example to my old school friend Eunice Barber, for her assistance with solving various genealogical puzzles and to my dear and glorious parish church of St Katharine’s Blackrod with all its friendships and support. They play a significant part in this book, as they have in my life, and not least through my growing friendship with its senior churchwarden Margaret Ryding and their and her support for this next (and probably last!) stage of my life.
John Atherton
25 May 2014
Feast of the Venerable Bede




1. ‘That They Might Have Life, And Have It More Abundantly’ (John 10.10): The Argument Emerges
This book is about what matters most to most people most of the time, whether as individuals, families, communities or societies. It is therefore deliberately and primarily about what the American sociologist Robert Bellah has called ‘the world of (the) daily life’ of people which they face with ‘a practical or pragmatic interest’. It is about bringing about ‘a projected state of affairs by bodily movements’ which Schutz calls ‘working’. So it is a world governed by ‘the means/ends schema’, a world of ‘striving’ (Bellah 2011, 2). That is how it is so often for most people, and it always has been since the dawn of the human about 200,000 years ago. For other commentators like the archaeologist and historian Morris, surveying human life from 15,000 years ago, it is about society’s ‘abilities to get things done in the world’ (Morris 2013, 5) including in terms of the adequate provision of the basics for human life on earth, as food, clothing and shelter, and increasingly, too, in later periods, in terms of life expectancy, health and education. You can’t have a good life if you die before the age of five, and now we don’t. In other words, this story is simply about the ‘world of daily life’, but it is also significantly about, for the economist Angus Deaton, ‘how people have managed to make their lives better’, so often in terms of ‘what makes life worth living’ (2013, ix, xiv). And, at the heart of these changes in human development lie the Industrial and then Mortality Revolutions from the eighteenth century, transforming human life in ways never achieved and never really dreamt of in the previous 200,000 years of human history. And all this so often allows and enables that concern to be developed into the pursuit of a good life, a life that turns out well, the basis of a flourishing life and community. It is, as John’s Gospel reminds us, the importance of not just having a life, but having it more abundantly. It is very difficult to have the second without the first, as liberation theologians have rightly reminded us.
But this story is also about how these amazing developments in human living have been intimately accompanied by what historians and economists call ‘the paradox of development’ or the often negative and destructive or damaging consequences of social change (Morris 2011, 28). For example, the astonishing improvements in economic growth, so important for nurturing, sustaining and progressing human wellbeing, have also been accompanied by breath-taking increases in inequalities, particularly between nations, but also within them. The latter is especially the case in the USA and UK and other developed economies, with most people suffering at best a plateauing of incomes and with the super-rich, the top 1 per cent – or even more so, the top 0.1 per cent – taking an increasingly disproportionate share of national income and wealth. And the damage to the economic, political and social life of such nations is beginning to become more evident. For recent generations, parents have fought successfully and hoped realistically (for the first time in human history such progressive change has become achievable) that their children would make a better life for themselves than their parents. That has certainly been the case in my own family, classic English working