liberation theology

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Propaganda and the Public Mind by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, deindustrialization, digital divide, European colonialism, experimental subject, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, interchangeable parts, language acquisition, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, one-state solution, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, Washington Consensus

The Pope was able to undermine liberation theology, get rid of the progressive bishops, and put in very reactionary ones. The effect is that there is nothing left in Recife. Except for people roughly my age, people don’t even know about this history anymore. Liberation theology was dismantled. There’s been a lot of commentary in the last couple of weeks about the Pope’s visit to Mexico. I’ve collected these articles, too. The standard one says that liberation theology is extinct. Now there is what they call “post-liberation theology.” There’s a question about just how liberation theology became extinct. Liberation theology was one of the reasons for the regime of terror and repression that spread over the continent, with national security states and state terror—always with U.S. backing.

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This is the army that murdered Archbishop Romero and the Jesuit intellectuals, along with a few other exploits. That’s symbolic, and they understand it. The new post-liberation theology is semitolerable to elites. The tepid version that gets reported, and it’s not totally false, is that the post-liberation theology pleads with the rich to be nicer to the poor. The new idea is, you evangelize the rich so that they have a social conscience and they’ll drop some more crumbs down on the poor. They’ll accept their social responsibility. The bad kind of liberation theology, which has in some mysterious way become extinct, called on priests to do what Dom Hélder Câmara was doing: organize base communities of poor people who might organize to take their fate into their own hands.

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I didn’t know him, but about two years ago I happened to be in Recife, which was his base. He was one of the leading figures in liberation theology. He made a real difference in Brazil and in the world, and in particular in Recife. The church traditionally had been the church of the rich. He turned it into a church of the poor. He got his priests and nuns to work in the poor areas. Church buildings were given over to educational and health institutions. It made a big change. Recife was one of the leading centers of liberation theology. It was devastated, mainly by violence, but also by the Vatican. The Vatican was strongly opposed to Dom Hélder Câmara.

The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure by Shawn Micallef

big-box store, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, gentrification, ghettoisation, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, knowledge worker, liberation theology, Mason jar, McMansion, new economy, post scarcity, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

And, as Kate and I discovered, the typical urban North American–style brunch, with all of its time-wasting and self-flagellating aspects, has taken root here too, within this larger culture of middle-class enjoyment, right down to the last detail. Reflecting on it later, I was reminded of my graduate work studying liberation theology as a transnational social movement, a theory and practice that began in Latin America in the poorest parts of Catholic parishes. Adherents to liberation theology took to heart biblical notions of helping the poor and were using the Church itself as a means of empowering – liberating – the impoverished. That is, until the movement’s popular spread was stamped out in the 1980s due to its often overtly Marxist tendencies, something the current Pope, Francis, saw during his time as a local priest in Argentina (he is now seemingly making amends for his lack of action during that era).

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Churches in the United States and Canada provided sanctuary for people who were unofficially recognized as refugees, putting those providing the sanctuary in legal harm as they were harbouring illegal aliens. I looked at how people in those North American churches, not all of them Catholic, found common cause with those in Latin America, seeing themselves as part of the same liberation theology movement, though their backgrounds and geographic locations were different. In connecting the North American sanctuary movement with liberation theology, I investigated a school of sociology that explained how social movements spread transnationally, between groups of people and individuals who had little direct contact with one another, yet who rallied around the same causes.

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Bear in mind I was researching and writing in the late 1990s, when the Internet did exist but well before it reached the incredible, unrelenting level of global connectedness it has since achieved, and writing about events that largely played out in the 1980s, when the web was still Al Gore’s dream. That I was consuming a Buenos Aires brunch in a country that was one of the epicentres of liberation theology was purely coincidental, but it did hasten the connection for me. If the near-identical customs of brunch could spread to Argentina, there’s little to stop a sense of class identity and consciousness from forming between brunchers here and elsewhere, just as liberation theology and its sense of mission did two or three decades ago, when we relied on limited analog forms of communication. The brunching class is global, more than a century after this troublesome meal was first imagined as an escape from the rigours of formal class traditions, and just as this food trend travelled far, so could collaborative connections between these creative middle-class people along the same networks.

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes by Mark Skousen

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, experimental economics, financial independence, Financial Instability Hypothesis, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, liberation theology, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, pushing on a string, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

Some Marxists, such as David Schweickart, suggest some form of "economic democracy" will develop after the "current late decadent" stage of capitalism plays itself out (Schweickart 2002). The Rise and Fall of Liberation Theology In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a Marxist-driven ideology developed in Latin America, especially among Catholic priests who worked in the barrios and favelas, known as "liberation theology." While rejecting the Marxist extremes of atheism and materialism, these political activists sought to liberate the poor by combining Marxist doctrines of exploitation, class struggle, and imperialism with the Christian theology of compassion for the poor and underprivileged.

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"Christ led me to Marx," declared Ernesto Cardenal, the Nicaraguan priest, to Pope John Paul II in 1983. "I'm a Marxist who believes in God, follows Christ and is a revolutionary for the sake of his kingdom" (Novak 1991, 13). The father of liberation theology, Gustavo Gutierrez, is a short, mild-mannered professor of theology who wrote about his work with the poor in his native city of Lima, Peru, in Theology of Liberation (1973). Gutierrez explained his "liberation theology" in Marxist terms (McGovern 1980, 181-82): I discovered three things. I discovered that poverty was a destructive thing, something to be fought against and destroyed not merely something which was the object of our charity.

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To truly liberate Latin America, he and other disciples of Adam Smith advocate open markets, foreign investment, low taxes, opportunities for business creation and ownership of property by all citizens, and political stability under the rule of law—a "liberal, pluralistic, communitarian, public-spirited, dynamic, inventive" nation not unlike the Asian tigers adopted in the recent past (Novak 1991, 32).9 Since the fall of Soviet communism and the socialist central-planning model, liberation theology has lost its steam and most Latin American countries have adopted a more open economy. Consequently, Latin nations have grown rapidly and the percentage of poor has declined. Orbis Books and the Maryknoll Fathers and Sisters ministry no longer publish books on liberation theology. The Next Revolution Only a few years after Marx's masterpiece, Capital, was published, a new breed of European economists came on the scene. These economists corrected the errors of Marx and the classical economists, and brought about a permanent revolution.

What Kind of Creatures Are We? (Columbia Themes in Philosophy) by Noam Chomsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, classic study, conceptual framework, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, liberation theology, mass incarceration, means of production, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Turing test, wage slave

That leaves open the door to the lively and impressive tradition of Christian anarchism—for example, Dorothy Day’s Catholic Workers Movement. And to many achievements of the liberation theology that was initiated half a century ago in Vatican II, igniting a vicious U.S. war against the church to destroy the heresy of a return to the radical pacifist message of the Gospels. The war was a success, according to the School of the Americas (since renamed), which trains Latin American killers and torturers and boasts triumphantly that the U.S. Army helped defeat liberation theology.5 So it did, leaving a trail of religious martyrs, part of a hideous plague of repression that consumed the hemisphere.

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See also acquisition of language; atomic elements of computation; communication; computational procedure; nature of language; origin of language language of thought (LOT): as biological inheritance, 59; Humboldt on, 37; origin of, 13 Lasswell, Harold, 76 Latin America: liberation theology in, xxii, 64, 65–66; U.S. fear of Communist influence in, 77 Lavoisier, Antoine, 108 Leibniz, Gottfried, 33, 53, 86 Leninist vanguardism, xxii Lewis, C. I., 31 Lewontin, Richard: on origin of language, as mystery, xix, 39–40, 125; on “storytelling” about origin of language, xix, 40 liberalism, classical: anarchism as heir to principles of, 62, 63, 71; wrecking of, by capitalism, 62 liberation theology, in Latin America: and principals of anarchism, xxii, 64; U.S. suppression of, 65–66 libertarianism: American vs. traditional forms of, 66; and freedom of the people from guardianship, 80; left and right, unification of, 66 libertarian socialism: anarchism as form of, 62, 63; range of systems included under, 63; U.S. experiments in, 63.

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., 124 Brock, William, 108 Brown, Roger, 42 capitalism: and change from price to wage, 73; Dewey on, 70–71; hindering of human development by, xxi; history of U.S. activism against ravages of, 72–75; necessity of state as protector of oppressed in, xxiii, 67; wrecking of classical liberalism by, 62 Carter administration, and U.S. plutocracy, 76 Cartesian dualism, 82–83; as commonsense, 82–83; and creative character of language, 6–7, 93–94, 127; delay in supplanting of, by Newtonian physics, 88; end of, Priestley on, 113–14; and explanatory gap in explaining mental phenomenon, 94; and language as defining feature of humans, 93–94; modern forms of, 30; Newton’s adherence to, xvi, 33–34, 83, 85, 86, 98–99; Newton’s destruction of, xvi–xvii, 30, 33–34, 35, 52, 85, 111–12, 113–14. See also mechanical philosophy; mind-body problem Catholicism: and Christian anarchism, 64; and liberation theology, 65–66 Catholic Workers Movement, 64 causative link to external objects: in animal signals, xviii–xix, 41–42, 126; lack of, in human language, xix, 7, 42–43 chemistry, unification of with physics: and abandonment of erroneous conception of physical laws, 36, 109, 124–25, 143n45; and ignorance hypothesis, 124; parallels of, with research in science of mind, 36, 109–11, 114, 120; pragmatic pursuit of, 106–9 Christian anarchism, 64 Churchland, Patricia, 21 Churchland, Paul, 35, 133n13 civil personality, of women and servants, 46 civil rights activism, and libertarian socialism, 63 Clarke, Desmond, 93–94 coercion, unjustified, dismantling of: as anarchist principle, xxiii, 61, 63–64, 66; Dewey on, 70–71 cognition: lack of accessible evidence on evolution of, xix, 39–40, 125; lack of evolution in, 40; scope of, as product of cognitive limits, 56–57, 59, 105.

What We Say Goes: Conversations on U.S. Power in a Changing World by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

banking crisis, British Empire, Doomsday Clock, failed state, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, informal economy, liberation theology, mass immigration, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, oil shale / tar sands, operational security, peak oil, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus

The current pope, Benedict XVI, who has managed to mire himself in controversy around his statements about Islam, was known as the enforcer during the reign of the much revered and hallowed Pope John Paul II.15 He was the guy who apparently purged high-ranking Catholic officials who supported liberation theology. We don’t know the inner workings of the Vatican, but that’s been reported. And it certainly looks like that from his writings. The crime of liberation theology was that it takes the Gospels seriously. That’s unacceptable. The Gospels are radical pacifist material, if you take a look at them. When the Roman emperor Constantine adopted Christianity, he shifted it from a radical pacifist religion to the religion of the Roman Empire.

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When the Roman emperor Constantine adopted Christianity, he shifted it from a radical pacifist religion to the religion of the Roman Empire. So the cross, which was the symbol of the suffering of the poor, was put on the shield of the Roman soldiers. Since that time, the Church has been pretty much the church of the rich and the powerful—the opposite of the message of the Gospels. Liberation theology, in Brazil particularly, brought the actual Gospels to peasants. They said, let’s read what the Gospels say, and try to act on the principles they describe. That was the major crime that set off the Reagan wars of terror and Vatican repression. The United States was virtually at war with the Catholic Church in the 1980s.

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The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction by Mark Lilla

Berlin Wall, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, coherent worldview, creative destruction, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, liberation theology, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, urban planning, women in the workforce

And this error could only be rectified through a new kind of therapeutic thinking that would return human beings to ordinary experience. Rosenzweig’s call to a “battle for religion in the twentieth-century sense” was also directed against Hegel, although the more proximate target was the liberal schools of theology that had dominated German religious thinking throughout the nineteenth century. Liberal theology, represented by figures like David Friedrich Strauss and Friedrich Schleiermacher, began as an attempt to work out a compromise between the doctrines of Protestant Christianity and modern thinking, and in this effort Hegel proved a useful ally. Hegel did not share the French Enlightenment view that religion was mere superstition; nor did he believe that it would be extinguished by the modern conquest of nature.

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Once the fundamental moral teachings of Judaism, separated from the dross of superstition and tradition, were shown to be virtually identical to those of Protestantism; once modern Jews became fully participating citizens of a modern state; once, as Hermann Cohen infamously put it, the spiritual harmony of Deutschtum and Judentum was allowed to develop—then, liberal Jews reasoned, the Protestant prejudice would be forgotten and Judaism’s place in the modern firmament would be assured. By the early decades of the twentieth century the theological-political illusions of liberal theology were only too apparent to the most thoughtful Protestants and Jews. After the disaster of World War I the young Swiss pastor Karl Barth wrote an explosive book called The Epistle to the Romans that threw into doubt everything liberal Protestantism stood for—humanism, enlightenment, bourgeois culture, the state.

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Given the damage done by theological liberalism, only a “hygiene of return” could fully renew the Jewish people. The notion of return is what links Rosenzweig’s two-front battle, against history and for religion. Modern philosophy, which reached its culmination in Hegel’s philosophy of history, had cut man off from life and alienated him from what is most his own. Modern liberal theology, whether Christian or Jewish, had gone further by alienating him from his God, whose commands had been reduced to the level of good citizenship and bourgeois propriety. If man was to return to himself and his God, if he was to learn to live fully again, he would have to undergo some sort of therapy: not by moving back in time but by learning to escape it.

Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Frank Gehry, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Howard Zinn, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, liberation theology, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, precariat, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, working poor

The reign of torture, murder and destruction in the region left hundreds of thousands dead. The contrast between the liberation of Soviet satellites and the crushing of hope in U.S. client states is striking and instructive—even more so when we broaden the perspective. The assassination of the Jesuit intellectuals brought a virtual end to “liberation theology,” the revival of Christianity that had its modern roots in the initiatives of Pope John XXIII and Vatican II, which he opened in 1962. Vatican II “ushered in a new era in the history of the Catholic Church,” theologian Hans Kung wrote. Latin American bishops adopted “the preferential option for the poor.”

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In the post–Vatican II revival, Latin American priests, nuns and laypersons took the message of the Gospels to the poor and the persecuted, brought them together in base communities, and encouraged them to take their fate into their own hands. Reaction to this heresy was violent repression. In the course of the terror and slaughter, the practitioners of liberation theology were a prime target. Among them are the six martyrs of the church whose execution twenty years ago is now commemorated with a resounding silence, barely broken. Last month [November 2009] in Berlin, the three presidents most involved in the fall of the Wall—George H.W. Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl—discussed who deserves credit.

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No doubts exist about responsibility for demolishing the attempt to revive the church of the Gospels in Latin America during the 1980s. The School of the Americas (since renamed) in Fort Benning, Georgia, which trains Latin American officers, many with gruesome records, proudly announces that the U.S. Army helped to “defeat liberation theology”—assisted, to be sure, by the Vatican, using the gentler hand of expulsion and suppression. The grim campaign to reverse the heresy set in motion by Vatican II received an incomparable literary expression in Dostoyevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. In this tale, set in Seville at “the most terrible time of the Inquisition,” Jesus Christ suddenly appears on the streets, “softly, unobserved, and yet, strange to say, everyone recognized him” and was “irresistibly drawn to him.”

Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, colonial rule, corporate personhood, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, invisible hand, liberation theology, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuremberg principles, one-state solution, open borders, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus

If Ota-Sik or Vaclav Havel had been carrying out their intellectual work in El Salvador, they would have [wound] up one sinister morning lying on the patio of a university campus with their heads destroyed by the bullets of an elite army battalion.15 Despite the U.S. triumph of November 1989, the yearning for freedom and justice has proven hard to crush. A year after Washington’s victory over the Church of the Gospels in El Salvador, the demon of liberation theology emerged again in Haiti with the democratic election of a liberation theology priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. As discussed earlier, Washington moved at once to destroy the threat, reinstating the rule of the military and the traditional ruling elite. A few years later the demon raised its head again in Honduras. One of the reasons for Obama’s indirect but sufficient support for the military coup that overthrew the democratically elected government and restored power to the traditional rulers was Zelaya’s moves toward “alliance with liberation-theologian priests and other environmental activists protesting mining and biofuelinduced deforestation.”

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That’s fair enough, if attention is rigorously guided by the culture of imperialism: focused on their crimes, with ours far removed from sight or memory. The contrast through the 1980s between the liberation of Soviet satellites and the violent crushing of hope in U.S. domains is striking and instructive, and becomes even more so when we broaden the perspective. The assassination of the Jesuit intellectuals was a crushing blow to liberation theology, the remarkable revival of Christianity that had its roots in the initiatives of Pope John XXIII and Vatican II, which he opened in 1962, an event that “ushered in a new era in the history of the Catholic Church,” in the words of the distinguished theologian Hans Küng, “an epoch-making and irrevocable turning point.”

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Included was the first 9/11, in Chile—by any objective measure far more severe than the second 9/11 in 2001—and also the regime of the killers and torturers in Argentina, perhaps the worst of all of them and Reagan’s special favorite. The plague finally struck Central America in full force throughout the 1980s. In the course of the terror and slaughter, the practitioners of liberation theology were a prime target, among them the martyrs of the Church whose execution in November 1989 was commemorated on the twentieth anniversary with a resounding silence, barely broken. Forgotten almost completely are Julia Elba and Celina Mariset Ramos. The one survivor of the massacre, Father Jon Sobrino, reminds us that they are the symbols of the suffering masses of El Salvador, and the world.8 Or would remind us if we were willing to listen.

Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means for America by William McGowan

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, corporate governance, David Brooks, different worldview, disinformation, East Village, friendly fire, haute couture, illegal immigration, immigration reform, liberation theology, medical residency, microplastics / micro fibres, New Journalism, obamacare, payday loans, postnationalism / post nation state, pre–internet, Seymour Hersh, uranium enrichment, yellow journalism, young professional

The “no-go” zone that the Times erected around Obama also encompassed “black liberation theology,” to which Reverend Wright was committed. On the Trinity United website, Wright cited James Cone, a professor at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, as the one who “systematized” this strain of Christianity. Cone had written, “If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him.” In the Times, however, black liberation theology came off merely as something “different” from what whites were used to hearing. According to Jodi Kantor’s first article in 2007, black liberation theology “interprets the Bible as the story of the struggles of black people, who by virtue of their oppression are better able to understand Scripture than those who have suffered less.”

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According to Jodi Kantor’s first article in 2007, black liberation theology “interprets the Bible as the story of the struggles of black people, who by virtue of their oppression are better able to understand Scripture than those who have suffered less.” A longer analysis by Michael Powell in May 2008, headlined “Race and the Race: A Fiery Theology under Fire,” called Reverend Wright a “man of capacious learning and ego,” and “one of the foremost adherents of this [black liberation] theology.” Powell quoted James Cone in a jocular mood, chuckling as he remarked, “You might say we took our Christianity from Martin and our emphasis on blackness from Malcolm.” For his part, Obama would not give up Wright. But as pressure mounted, he and his campaign decided that Obama should make a major speech on race in America, a speech which some later saw as one of American political history’s great orations, while others dismissed it as a “subject-changing speech.”

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Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

British Empire, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, failed state, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, launch on warning, liberation theology, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Westphalian system

Another aspect of religion in the United States is dissent and opposition, which was reflected in the Central American solidarity movement of the 1980s and during the recent invasion of Iraq when some clergy and churches spoke out. Central America was a very striking case, because the United States was basically at war with the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s had really shifted its traditional vocation. It had adopted aspects of liberation theology, and had recognized what’s called “the preferential option for the poor.” Priests, nuns, and lay workers were organizing peasants into communities, where they would read the Gospels and draw lessons about organization that they could use to try to take control of their own lives. And, of course, that immediately made them bitter enemies of the United States, and Washington launched a war to destroy them.

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And, of course, that immediately made them bitter enemies of the United States, and Washington launched a war to destroy them. For example, one of the publicity points of the School of the Americas, which changed its name in 2000 to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, is that the U.S. army helped “defeat liberation theology,” which is accurate.2 The Central American solidarity movement in the United States in the 1980s was something totally new. I don’t think there has been anything like this in the history of Europe. I don’t know of anyone in France who went to live in an Algerian village to help people and protect them against marauding French paratroopers, but tens of thousands of Americans went down in the 1980s and protected people under assault from the United States.

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El-Baradei, Mohamed elections (2002) (2004) El Salvador embedded journalists Empire as a Way of Life (Williams) Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences England, Lynndie Enlightenment Ethiopia ethnic cleansing Europe European Union (EU) evolution Fairbank, John King Fall, Bernard Falluja FBI fear Figueres, José Filipinos Financial Times First Seminole War Florida, conquest of Fog of War (documentary) Foreign Affairs foreign direct investment (FDI) France Franklin, Bruce freedom of speech freedom of the press Friedman, Thomas Gaddis, John Lewis Gallagher, Nancy Geneva Conventions Germany Glass, Charles Glennon, Michael global warming Gramsci, Antonio Grenada Gromyko, Andrey Grozny Guantánamo Guatemala Gulf War Gurkhas Ha’aretz Habermas, Jürgen Haiti Halliburton Hamas Harris, Zellig Hawaii health care Hegemony or Survival (Chomsky) Heidegger, Martin Hilla Hiroshima Hitler, Adolf Holland, Homeland Security Department Honduras humanitarian intervention Hume, David Huntington, Samuel Hussein, Saddam Hutton Report idealism Ignatieff, Michael Ignatius, David immigrants Chinese imperialism benevolence and costs of racism and India Indian Mutiny Indochina Indonesia industrialization In Retrospect (McNamara) intellectual culture intellectual self-defense intercontinental ballistic missiles International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) International Criminal Court international law Iran coup of 1953 Iraq: British occupation of coup of 1963 debt of democracy and history of U.S. relations with invasion of occupation of propaganda and U.S. elections and Israel Jackson, Andrew Jackson, Robert Jacksonian Democrats Janofsky, Michael Japan Jerusalem Jervis, Robert Johnson, Chalmers Johnson, Lyndon B. Justice Department Kennan, George Kennedy, John F. Kerry, John Kimhi, David Kim II Sung Kinzer, Stephen Kissinger, Henry Kurds Kuwait Kyoto protocol Lancet Lasswell, Harold Latin America Lebanon LeMay, Curtis Lewis, Anthony liberation theology Lippmann, Walter Lloyd George, David London, Jack London Review of Books Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio McCann, Thomas McNamara, Robert Madison, James Mandela, Nelson Mankiw, Gregory “manufacture of consent,” Marshall Plan Mayr, Ernst media Medicaid Mein Kampf (Hitler) mercenary army Mexico Middle East militarization of space military bases Mill, John Stuart Milošević, Slobodan mini nukes missile defense Monroe Doctrine Mossadegh, Mohammed Mussollini, Benito My Lai massacre Nagasaki Nanking Massacre National Security Strategy (2002) Native Americans nativism Nature Nazis Necessary Illusions (Chomsky) Negroponte, John Nehru, Jawaharlal New York Times Magazine Nicaragua Nigeria Nimitz, Chester William 9/11.

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Brooks, Dr. Strangelove, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, global supply chain, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, liberation theology, low skilled workers, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, stem cell, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

In America the tolerant-to-a-fault Episcopal Church has been in relentless decline. By contrast, the Southern Baptists have prospered. Altogether conservative Christians now make up a quarter of America’s population, according to Pew, significantly more than fifty years ago. People who seek liberation from liberation do not turn to liberation theology. The most remarkable religious success story of the past century has been the most emotional religion of all. Pentecostalism was founded just over a century ago in a scruffy part of Los Angeles by a one-eyed black preacher, convinced that God would send a new Pentecost if only people would pray hard enough.

…

Novak was not averse to spiritualizing capitalism—he talked about “the sense of communal religious vocation in economic activism” and argued that corporations “offer metaphors for grace, a kind of insight into God’s ways in human history.” The book could not have been better timed. It not only caught the heady mood of the Reagan years, it was taken up by the opposition in Eastern Europe, who were in the process of overthrowing Soviet hegemony, and by Latin American Catholics, who were tiring of the excesses of liberation theology. The book seemed to offer a new and exciting way forward for Catholics: challenging them to abandon their long-standing suspicion of capitalism and instead embrace it as a guarantee of both liberty and prosperity. Neuhaus’s The Naked Public Square was a jeremiad against liberal secularists who wanted to drive religion out of political life.

…

(“We have to work against the competition as well as the devil,” says one young preacher.) And there is also a fight-back by the Catholic Church. Having lost worshippers at a rate of 1 percent a year since 1991,13 mainly to Pentecostal churches, Rome is finally responding. That has meant getting rid of a lot of liberation theology; and also imitating the Pentecostals. Brazil’s most famous priest is now Marcelo Rossi, a former physical-education teacher who has been known to perform aerobics during his services. One American academic, Andrew Chestnut of the University of Houston, calls this “the Pentecostalisation of Latin American Christianity”; he estimates that 75 to 80 percent of Protestants in the region are Pentecostals and that in Brazil at least half of active Catholics have gravitated toward the charismatic movement.

Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky

Able Archer 83, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, one-state solution, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, uranium enrichment, wage slave, WikiLeaks, working-age population

The murder of the Jesuit intellectuals as the Berlin Wall fell was a final blow in defeating the heresy of liberation theology, the culmination of a decade of horror in El Salvador that opened with the assassination, by much the same hands, of Archbishop Óscar Romero, the “voice for the voiceless.” The victors in the war against the Church declared their responsibility with pride. The School of the Americas (since renamed), famous for its training of Latin American killers, announced as one of its “talking points” that the liberation theology initiated at Vatican II was “defeated with the assistance of the US army.”20 Actually, the November 1989 assassinations were almost a final blow; more effort was yet needed.

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A year later Haiti had its first free election, and to the surprise and shock of Washington—which had anticipated an easy victory for its own candidate, handpicked from the privileged elite—the organized public in the slums and hills elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a popular priest committed to liberation theology. The United States at once moved to undermine the elected government and, after the military coup that overthrew it a few months later, lent substantial support to the vicious military junta and its elite supporters who took power. Trade with Haiti was increased, in violation of international sanctions, and increased further under President Clinton, who also authorized the Texaco oil company to supply the murderous rulers, in defiance of his own directives.21 I will skip the disgraceful aftermath, amply reviewed elsewhere, except to point out that in 2004, the two traditional torturers of Haiti, France and the United States, joined by Canada, forcefully intervened once more, kidnapped President Aristide (who had been elected again), and shipped him off to central Africa.

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Kinsley, Michael Kissinger, Henry Kivimäki, Timo Klinghoffer, Leon Knox, Henry Korean War Kornbluh, Peter Krähenbühl, Pierre Krugman, Paul Kull, Steven Küng, Hans Kuperman, Alan Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) Kurds Kuwait labor movement Labor Party (Israel) Laden, Osama bin assassination of Lansdale, Edward Laos Latin America Lawson, Dominic Leahy, Patrick Lebanon Leffler, Melvyn LeoGrande, William Le Pen, Marine Levy, Gideon Lewis, Anthony liberal internationalists liberation theology Liberty, USS, attack Libya Liebknecht, Karl Likud party (Israel) Lincoln, Abraham Linebaugh, Peter Lippmann, Walter Locke, John Lodge, Henry Cabot London Review of Books Luftwaffe Lukes, Steven Luxemburg, Rosa Madison, James Madison, Wisconsin, uprising Madrid negotiations Maechling, Charles, Jr.

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis by Beth Macy

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Easter island, fake news, Haight Ashbury, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, medical residency, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, NSO Group, obamacare, off grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pill mill, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, single-payer health, social distancing, The Chicago School, Upton Sinclair, working poor, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

Partners in Health: Farmer was profiled by the journalist Tracy Kidder in his majestic book, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (New York: Random House, 2003). was a proponent: Dr. Paul Farmer, “How Liberation Theology Can Inform Public Health,” PIH.org, December 23, 2013. “Of all the forms of inequality”: Martin Luther King Jr., convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights press conference, Chicago, March 25, 1966. “go to the addicted”: Farmer, “How Liberation Theology Can Inform Public Health.” “dangerous”: Emma McGinty and Colleen Barry, “Stigma Reduction to Combat the Addiction Crisis—Developing an Evidence Base,” New England Journal of Medicine (April 2, 2020).

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The last time Tim saw Natalie, she told him she couldn’t remember when she’d last done meth, and the bupe he’d prescribed her was also working—she’d not taken opioids for some time. “She had come so far and was doing so well,” Tim said. Tim said his favorite part of the job was when patients who got better helped others. The helpers became the leaders of their own small groups, in a grassroots structure that liberation theology refers to as base communities. “When they start helping each other, then it takes off like a wildfire—that’s the gift. It is THEIR community that is doing the organizing, and we show up to learn from them,” he wrote. Tim was hopeful that would be the case with Natalie, who had recently revived a friend with Narcan and told Tim, brightly, “I think this is the best I’ve ever been.”

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“What they pulled off was a kind of spectacle,” Schertz said. “They used a spectacular form of giving to humiliate the international community,” which eventually spurred new World Health Organization guidelines and helped lower the price of drugs. I noted that Farmer, who died in February 2022 at the age of sixty-two was a proponent of applying liberation theology to medicine, as was Martin Luther King Jr. Its tenets: Poor people should get preferential care because they’re the most likely to get sick. “Imagine how much unnecessary suffering we might collectively avert if our health care and educational systems, foundations, and nongovernmental organizations genuinely made a preferential option for the poor?”

Pirates and Emperors, Old and New by Noam Chomsky

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, drone strike, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, union organizing, urban planning

Few even know the names of the assassinated intellectuals, in dramatic contrast to dissidents in enemy states; one can imagine the reaction if they had not merely been jailed and exiled, but had their brains blown out by elite forces trained and armed by the Kremlin, capping a record of horrendous atrocities. The basic facts are understood. The School of the Americas announces with pride that “liberation theology . . . was defeated with the assistance of the U.S. Army,” thanks in no small measure to the training it provided to military officers of the client-states. The “Victory for U.S. Fair Play” left more than a trail of mutilated corpses and ruined lives, in the midst of ecological disaster. After the U.S. took over again in 1990, Nicaragua declined to the rank of poorest country of the hemisphere after Haiti—which, by coincidence, has been the leading target of U.S. intervention and violence for a century, and now shares with Cuba the distinction of enduring a crushing U.S. embargo.

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If they try to “raise their heads,” they must be crushed by international terrorism, which will be honored as a noble cause. If they endure in silence, their misery can be ignored. History teaches few lessons with such crystal clarity. Though Central America faded from view in the 1990s, terror elsewhere remained prominent on the policy agenda, and having defeated liberation theology, the U.S. military was directed to new tasks. In the Western hemisphere, Haiti and Colombia became the focus of concern. In Haiti, the U.S. had provided ample support for state violence through the 1980s (as before), but new problems arose in 1990, when to everyone’s surprise, Haiti’s first democratic election was won overwhelmingly by a populist priest, thanks to large-scale popular mobilization in the slums and rural areas that had been ignored.

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On recent atrocities, see Americas Watch, Settling into Routine (May 1986), reporting that political killings and disappearances—90 percent at the hands of Duarte’s armed forces—continue at well over four a day, a real improvement in this leading terrorist state, along with numerous other government atrocities. In retrospect, the reality is sometimes conceded, for example by the School of the Americas, which trains Latin American officers for tasks of the kind they accomplished in El Salvador, and proudly proclaims that in the 1980s, “Liberation Theology . . . was defeated with the assistance of the U.S. Army.” Cited by Adam Isacson and Joy Olson, Just the Facts (Washington: Latin America Working Group and Center for International Policy, 1999), ix. 6. Chris Krueger and Kjell Enge, Security and Development Conditions in the Guatemalan Highlands (Washington Office on Latin America, 1985); Alan Nairn, “The Guatemala Connection,” Progressive, May 1986; Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, The Israeli Connection (Pantheon, 1987). 7.

The Rich and the Rest of Us by Tavis Smiley

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, ending welfare as we know it, F. W. de Klerk, fixed income, full employment, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, job automation, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traffic fines, trickle-down economics, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor

One of Judaism’s “ethics of responsibility” is the concept of chesed (“deeds of kindness”). Social justice is woven into the history of social work, health care, human rights education, the Global Justice Movement, and numerous grassroots organizations, including The Green Party. “A love that liberates” is more than a touchy-feely aspiration. It is the premise of Liberation Theology—a “bottom-up” movement based on Jesus’s example to fight for the poor against unjust economic, political, or social conditions. This international and interdenominational movement uses social justice as its guide to provide hope and alleviate the poor’s suffering and struggle. Corporate capitalism tends to clash with this kind of social justice.

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It’s the internal rot that’s ominously heading the country toward the point of no return. A dynamite fuse has been lit outside of the communities where the “safe class” resides in luxurious, gated spaces while working people and poor people are struggling in the bankruptcy of the streets. Within the bosom of the Black prophetic tradition, liberation theology, and social justice advocacy, righteous indignation toward poverty is now given moral license to explode. These traditions demand that we reject violence but welcome public outrage at corporate and societal greed. As the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds, “A good indignation brings out all one’s powers.”

Rogue States by Noam Chomsky

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edward Snowden, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, land reform, liberation theology, Mahbub ul Haq, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, oil shock, precautionary principle, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Tobin tax, union organizing, Washington Consensus

Guarantees for “the global common good and the exercise of economic and social rights” and “sustainable development of society” must be the core element of “a new vision of global progress in solidarity.”10 A tepid version of the Vatican’s “post-liberation theology,” as it is called, is admissible into the free market of ideas, unlike the liberation theology it replaces. The latter heresy “is almost, if not quite, extinct,”11 commentators inform us. The modalities of extinction have been consigned to their proper place in history, along with the archbishop whose assassination opened the grim decade of Washington’s war against the Church and other miscreants, and the leading Jesuit intellectuals whose assassination by the same US-backed “Latin-style fascists” marked its close.

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Recently in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, there was a meeting of 17 Latin American countries on the debt. The archbishop of Tegucigalpa, president of the Latin American Conference of Bishops, speaking of the debt, said that it “is not one more problem for us to face—it is the problem. The foreign debt is like a tombstone.”7 Latinamerica Press, which comes from Peruvian liberation theology circles, reported what I’m now quoting, but it ought to be on the front pages here. It’s a problem that we’re creating and we’re maintaining. But the conference was not even reported. Then come the data. These are World Bank figures. The data roughly are the following: in the 1970s the Latin American debt was about $60 billion.

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, launch on warning, liberation theology, long peace, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment

The achievements of international terrorism are excluded from sanitized history, but they are recognized with pride by the perpetrators. The famous School of the Americas, which trains Latin American officers to carry out their missions, proudly announces as one of its “talking points” that the US Army helped to “defeat liberation theology,”42 the heresy to which the Latin American Church succumbed when it adopted “the preferential option for the poor” and was made to suffer its own “terrors of the earth” for this departure from good order. Symbolically, the grim decade of Reagan-Bush I terror was opened, shortly before they took office, by the assassination of a conservative Salvadoran archbishop who had become a “voice for the voiceless,” with thinly veiled complicity of the US-backed security forces; and the decade closed with the murder of six Jesuit Salvadoran intellectuals whose brains were blown out, and their housekeeper and her daughter murdered, by an elite Washington-armed and -trained battalion that had already compiled a record of bloody atrocities.

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And though the MPLA “bears a grave responsibility for its country’s plight” in later years, it was “the relentless hostility of the United States [that] forced it into an unhealthy dependence on the Soviet bloc and encouraged South Africa to launch devastating military raids in the 1980s.”50 The many campaigns of international terrorism and economic warfare to overcome “successful defiance” and “left-wing excesses” adopting “the philosophy of the new nationalism” and perhaps even influenced by liberation theology, barely sampled here, are considered insignificant, or perhaps obviously legitimate, as are their bitter consequences. Accordingly, they scarcely enter the enormous current literature and public discussion of international terrorism and Washington’s supposedly new doctrine of “regime change.”

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See also specific nations Afghanistan war and, 200 Bush II and, 106–7 Cuba and, 89–90, 202–3 Kennan on, 47 military and “internal security,” 191–92 “New Nationalism” and, 66 Nicaraguan influence on, 96 nonaligned movement and, 165 Reagan and, 137–38 response in, to 9-11, 191 “top-down” democracies in, 142 US-backed terror in, 91–92, 108, 194 US dominance of, 149 Wilson and, 64 Latvia, 132 League of Nations, 48 Lebanon, 100, 164, 167–68, 190, 194–95, 213 Leffler, Melvyn, 224 Leiken, Robert, 99 Lewis, Anthony, 92, 117 Lewis, Jeffrey, 220 “liberation theology,” 91 Liberia, 101 Libya, 97, 116, 117, 193, 194 Lieven, Anatol, 19, 120 Lippmann, Walter, 6, 8 Liquica massacre, 56 Lloyd, Selwyn, 164 Lloyd George, David, 69, 161 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 81, 86 Luck, Edward, 31 Macedonia, 132 Macmillan, Harold, 79 Madison, James, 7, 67 Madrid conference, 169 Maechling, Charles, 191 Malley, Robert, 172, 174 Mandela, Nelson, 23, 110, 190 Mandelbaum, Michael, 44 Marcos, Ferdinand, 112, 114 Marlin, Randal, 8 Marlowe, Lara, 115, 141 Marshall Islands, 179 Marshall Plan, 149–50 Marx, Karl, 45 Mas Conosa, Jorge, 86 Mayr, Ernst, 1 McCarthyism, 27 McNamara, Robert, 78, 82, 83 Medicaid, 119 Medicare, 119 Metternich, Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar, 63, 97 Mexico, 72, 35, 87, 146, 200 Micronesia, 179, 232 Middle East, 64, 150, 163 anger at US in, 210–16 democratization of, 136 Israeli nuclear weapons, 157–58 terrorism in, 110, 194–95, 212–13 US-Israel alliance and, 159, 161–70, 18 Mill, John Stuart, 44–45 Miller, Steven, 37 Milosevic, Slobodan, 56, 57 Mishra, Brajesh, 160 missile defense programs, 219–29 Mitchell Plan, 177 Mobutu Sese Seko, 112 Monroe Doctrine, 46, 63–64, 66, 93 Moratinos, Miguel, 171 Morgenthau, Hans, 48 Morocco, 30–31 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 93 Mozambique, 110 Mueller, Robert, 200 multinational corporations, 60, 150.

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, complexity theory, delayed gratification, desegregation, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Future Shock, gentrification, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, scientific management, scientific worldview, sexual politics, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, War on Poverty, work culture , young professional

But science could not provide the nerve and will that enabled "disinherited groups" to resist injustice. In order to defeat their oppressors, they had "to believe rather more firmly in the justice and in the probable triumph of their cause, than any impartial science would give them the right to believe." In 1919, Niebuhr still adhered to the liberal theology of the social gospel, notwithstanding his impatience with liberal politics. His first book, Does Civilization Need Religion? (1926), rested on a liberal version of the Protestant tradition. By 1932, however, religious liberalism had been shaken to its foundations by Karl Barth's reassertion of dogmatic theology.

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By 1932, however, religious liberalism had been shaken to its foundations by Karl Barth's reassertion of dogmatic theology. Niebuhr had reservations about the political implications of Barth's neo-orthodoxy, which seemed to him to write off the political realm as irredeemably corrupt; but he too came to accept original sin as an "inescapable fact of human existence," to reject the shallow optimism of liberal theology, and to acknowledge the impossibility of justifying religious belief on purely rational grounds. In the face of "nature's ruthlessness"— of the "brevity and mortality of natural life"—feelings of trust and gratitude (in other words, a belief in God) could not be defended by an appeal to reason, as Niebuhr explained in An Interpretation of Christian Ethics -370- (1935).

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Even after he had come to reject progressivism's faith in moral suasion— and much of Moral Man consisted of a relentless attack on the illusion that the powerful would surrender their power without a struggle—he still refused to regard politics as a struggle for power unredeemed by considerations of justice and morality. When he declared that "social cohesion is impossible without coercion," he parted company with many progressives ; but in the next clause in this series, he dissociated himself from Marxists and other revolutionaries, including radicalized adherents of the social gospel, forerunners of liberation theology today, who wished to put religion at the service of the proletarian struggle against capitalism. Unlike progressives, revolutionaries gladly accepted the need for coercion, but they refused to admit that "coercion is impossible without the creation of social injustice." They believed that revolutionary coercion would create conditions of perfect justice, or at least that the new order would represent such an improvement over the old that a few passing injustices, committed on behalf of a good cause, must not be allowed to stand in its way.

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl

Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , single-payer health, special economic zone, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, Yom Kippur War

When he and his aides left the country, they looked down to see the light from countless mirrors held aloft to reflect the sun’s rays at his departing plane. It was a remarkable dress rehearsal for an even bigger trip the pope was planning, to another country where the faith of ordinary people stood at odds with a government’s program of militant secularism. The term Liberation Theology was invented by the Peruvian priest and theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino in 1971. Merino would be accused of swapping out theological terms with political ones and of reducing a spiritual teaching to a materialist social theory. One of the most famous of the liberation theologians was Ernesto Cardenal, the Nicaraguan priest and poet who in July 1979 became the minister of culture in the new Sandinista government that took power in Managua after toppling dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle.

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He conceded the point that Catholic institutions had sometimes allied themselves with the forces of dictatorship and oppression and went on to stress that, whenever the church took sides, it should always strive to take the side of justice. These were not tactical compromises, made for the sake of calming his critics in the Liberation Theology camp. Christian humanism, and the inviolability of the individual, remained at the core of his thinking. In March he addressed these issues in his first encyclical. Entitled Redemptor Hominis (Redeemer of Man), it offered one of the clearest statements of his personalist philosophy. It is a text that displays a profound anxiety about the rising threat posed to individual human rights by various collectivist systems, including totalitarianism, imperialism, and colonialism: If human rights are violated in time of peace, this is particularly painful and from the point of view of progress it represents an incomprehensible manifestation of activity directed against man, which can in no way be reconciled with any program that describes itself as “humanistic.” . . .

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The European religious wars in the wake of the Reformation, and especially the English Civil War in the seventeenth century, showed how millennial longings for justice and equality gave rise to organizations that had remarkable similarities to twentieth-century revolutionary movements. The syntheses of Marxism and religion attempted by Ali Shariati and the theorists of Catholic liberation theology in the 1970s show that Marx’s thinking was, in a deeper sense, more congenial to Abrahamic prophecy than he might have been willing to acknowledge. So perhaps it should come as little surprise that those who defined themselves as the militant avant-garde of “material progress” should have met with particularly bitter resistance from the forces of organized religion.

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

But nothing prepared the Vatican for the competitive challenge of the Pentecostal and charismatic churches, not just at the far limits of its reach but in places like Latin America long considered the faith’s backyard. Already in the 1970s and 1980s, the Church faced internal dissent with the emergence of liberation theology in Brazil and elsewhere in the continent. The threat of liberation theology has diminished, particularly with the spread of democracy in the region.12 But the inroads of the new denominations and the greater intensity of renewalist religious practice (more people attending longer services and adapting more aspects of their life to the church’s requirements) are chipping away at the influence of the once overwhelmingly dominant Catholicism.

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See also Economic/financial crises Redeemed Christian Church of God, 196 Referenda, 86, 94, 95, 151 Reforms, 69, 77, 84, 96, 100, 102, 122, 167, 172, 184, 202, 223, 237, 243, 250–254 Regimes, 138, 247 Regulations/deregulation, 29, 30, 32, 36, 48, 49, 101, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 174, 184, 187, 190, 212, 228 Reid, Richard, 111 Religion, 4, 5, 10, 16, 18, 23, 24, 25, 33, 41, 44, 66, 67, 75, 78, 154, 193, 217, 225, 231, 233, 244 Evangelicals/fundamentalists/charismatic, 8–9, 73, 106, 194–199 and financial success, 195, 198 liberation theology, 197 See also Catholic Church; Islam Remittances, 60, 63 Repression, 14, 53, 54, 70, 73, 85, 100, 219, 242 Republican Party, 76, 79, 95, 239. See also Tea Party movement Reputations, 7, 162, 166, 174 Research and development (R&D), 182, 183, 229 Resource issues, 15, 18, 23, 29, 43, 52, 75, 102, 125, 169, 171, 174, 175, 226, 230, 231 Revolt of the elites, 48, 49 Revolutionary transformations, 11 Rewards, 24–25, 26, 73 Rid, Thomas, 115, 122, 127–128 Riesman, David, 46 Rights, 74, 200, 247.

Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy by Robert A. Sirico

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, corporate governance, creative destruction, delayed gratification, demographic winter, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Ford Model T, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, informal economy, Internet Archive, liberation theology, means of production, moral hazard, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, profit motive, road to serfdom, Tragedy of the Commons, zero-sum game

The reasons for the secularization of religious institutions are undoubtedly many, but among them one can identify the loss of confidence in the message of the Gospel in the face of secular social science. In the popular imagination one sees the budding of this mindset in Harvey Cox’s The Secular City (1965), followed by other corruptions of orthodox Christianity by the secularist ideology that underlay, for example, most forms of Liberation theology and Feminist theology. These movements called into question the whole manner in which theology had been done over the preceding 2000 years, introducing a skepticism about traditional faith, which their adherents believed needed to be corrected by Marxist social analysis or feminist critiques of “patriarchy” in the church.

…

Neal Joplin, Janis Joyce, James Judaism Judeo-Christian worldview justice “commutative justice,” social justice K Kagame, Paul Kazakhstan Kenya, Khrushchev, Nikita L labor Lai, Jimmy LASIK leftism Lenin, Vladimir Lesotho Leviticus, Book of Lewis, C. S. Liberation theology libertinism liberty. See also freedom economic personal Lima loans Los Angeles Lutherans M Mackinac Island, Michigan Maimonides, Moses Manichaeism Mao Zedong Marcuse, Herbert market, the Marx, Karl Marxism materialism Matthew, Gospel of Medicaid Medicare mercy Methodists Michelin Company, The Michelin, Francois Middle East, the missionaries Missionary Earthkeeping Model T, the Monopoly Moore, Michael morality mortgages Mother Teresa Muraya, Eva Mystery of Capital, The N National Institutes of Health Nazism New England New Testament, the New York City Nicaragua Nobel Prize, the North Korea North Vietnamese Communism O Obama, Barack Obamacare Occupy Wall Street Olasky, Marvin Opitz, Reverend Edmund P paganism Parris, Matthew Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary by Alain de Botton

Airbus A320, Boeing 747, fear of failure, invention of the telephone, liberation theology, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Silicon Valley

Because it seemed a pity to end our discussion of metaphysical matters on such a note, I asked the two men to tell me how a traveller might most productively spend his or her last minutes before boarding and take-off. The Reverend was adamant: the task, he said, was to turn one’s thoughts intently to God. ‘But what if one can’t believe in him?’ I pursued. The Reverend fell silent and looked away, as though this were not a polite question to ask of a priest. Happily, his colleague, weaned on a more liberal theology, delivered an equally succinct but more inclusive reply, to which my thoughts often returned in the days to come as I watched planes taxiing out to the runways: ‘The thought of death should usher us towards whatever happens to matter most to us; it should lend us the courage to pursue the way of life we value in our hearts.’ 5 Just beyond the security area was a suite, named after an ill-fated supersonic jet and reserved for the use of first-class passengers.

Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity Into Prosperity by Bernard Lietaer, Jacqui Dunne

3D printing, 90 percent rule, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clockwork universe, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, conceptual framework, credit crunch, different worldview, discounted cash flows, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, liberation theology, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, Occupy movement, price stability, reserve currency, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban decay, War on Poverty, working poor

First, there are loans for personal needs, known as consumption loans, to cover food, clothing, gas, and items for personal hygiene. Second are comparatively larger loans, called production loans, for setting up or in most cases expanding small businesses, such as street stands, shops, and ser vice providers. Segundo’s inspiration came primarily from Liberation Theology, a Christian movement that developed in the Catholic Church in Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s and explores freedom from economic and social injustice. Another major influence on Segundo came from the Spanish cooperative movement of the late 1950s, called Mondragon. It is a federation of cooperatives that currently provides employment to some 83,000 people in a network of 256 companies Strategies for Banking 105 The construction of the Asmoconp, Associação de Moradores do Conjunto Palmeira during the mid- to late 1980s.

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See also Mobile phone Internet access: enabling currencies, 60– 61, 117; Human Right, A, and, 165–166, 166; in multicurrency world, 55 Internship, 16–17 Intolerance, 182 Intrinsic risk, 45 Intrinsic value, 64 Investing class, 193–194 Ireland, 96– 98 Irrigation, 187 Isolation, 19 Ithaca Health Alliance (IHA), 163, 164 Ithaca Health Fund (IHF), 164 Ithaca HOURS, 162–165, 163 Job: creation, 119, 145–146, 216; satisfaction, 18; work and, 219–220 John Galt, 113 Jord Arbete Kapital (JAK), 109–113, 111 256 INDEX Junk mail, 152 Jury duty, 83 Juvenile justice, 80, 83 Keynesian stimulus, 23–24, 145–146 Keynesian School of Economics, 35 Knowledge exchange network, 184 Krama, 190 KTA, 157 Kukuyu, 209 !Kung, 46– 48, 196 Kyoto Protocol, 116 Labor certificate, 176–177 Landfill. See Trash Layoff, 12 Leadership, 221–122 Learning currency, 153–155, 201 Learning retention, 154–155 Legal aid, 85 Legal tender, 57– 58, 150 Lehman Brothers, 70 Leverage, 101–102, 152–153 Liberation Theology, 104–105 Library, 21 Liquidity, 145–146, 194 Literacy, 155, 216 Litigation, 18 Loan: with Banco Palmas, 106–107; consumption, 104–105, 106, 107; income and, 108; in Ithaca HOURS, 163–164; with JAK bank, 109–110, 112; microloan, 104–105, 107; production, 104–105, 107; Revolving Loan Fund, 129–130.

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican by Gerald Posner

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, book value, Bretton Woods, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, credit crunch, disinformation, dividend-yielding stocks, European colonialism, forensic accounting, God and Mammon, Index librorum prohibitorum, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, liberation theology, low interest rates, medical malpractice, Murano, Venice glass, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, power law, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

It was a clarion call for economic and social justice and set a goal of “just distribution” of wealth in Third World countries to help bridge the gap between rich and poor.101 The Wall Street Journal scorned that Papal decree as “souped-up Marxism,” but it would become the rallying cry for a generation of activist priests in Central and Latin America who advocated liberation theology, a volatile mixture of left-wing politics and Catholicism.102,VII Populorum Progressio at first concerned Sindona since it also attacked unrestrained capitalism: “Free market competition, however, should not be abolished, but simply maintained within moral limits.” The Pope, however, did not intend that his message about economic equality in any way limit a buying binge that Sindona had planned with the IOR.

…

Jesuit theologians had ignored Paul’s many requests to refrain from intense political activism. The sight of the black-uniformed prelates being dragged away by police at the front lines of massive protests over the war in Vietnam or efforts to ban the bomb were too frequent as far as the Vatican was concerned. Even worse was their enthusiastic dissemination of liberation theology, the combination of Catholicism and Marxism that fueled communist movements in El Salvador and Guatemala. The Jesuits’ Superior General, Pedro Arrupe, was an avowed political leftist and had resisted all requests for moderation from Rome. If John Paul did not bring the Jesuits into line, Arrupe might well judge the new Pope as indecisive as his predecessor.58 It is little wonder that with so many critical matters pending, John Paul sometimes seemed frazzled.

…

It was not a stretch for Bill Casey and Vernon Walters to convince John Paul that the church’s best interests in Latin and Central America were the same as those of the United States: supporting authoritarian regimes that were at least nominally Catholic. Although John Paul condemned “savage capitalism,” and even told a reporter that there were “kernels or seeds of truth” in Marxism, he nevertheless dramatically changed course from Paul VI when it came to liberation theology, a twentieth-century mixture of Catholicism and left-wing ideologies that emphasized a redistribution of wealth to help the poor, particularly through political activism.40 Marcinkus, from his work with Sindona and Calvi, was more familiar than any other Vatican official with how to move money around Central and Latin America.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

Rarely if ever examined from the angle of utopianism, these projects are the Paris World’s Fair of 1900 and, in the same year, the photographs commissioned by French banker Albert Kahn and the Socialist Second International led by Frenchman Jean Jaur es; the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the League of Nations; the Paris exhibit of 1937 celebrating science, technology The Future of Utopias and Utopianism 251 (especially electric lights), and art; French lawyer Rene Cassin’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948; the French student revolt and the “Prague Spring” of 1968, plus, in the same era, Latin American liberation theology and communities; and the 1992 emergence of visions of global citizenship following the emergence of a powerful European Union through the Maastricht Treaty. In each case, Winter reveals arguments and artifacts that demonstrate the appropriateness of the utopian label, yet without romanticizing the projects.

…

Buckminster Fuller (Fuller) 249 iPads 187, 193, 219, 222 iPhones 187, 219 iPods 2, 163, 187, 193, 219, 220, 238 Iran 189 Iraq War of 2003 11, 140 Iso, Abe 20 Israel 8, 24 kibbutzim in 24, 196–198 Italy 98 Jaher, Frederick Cople 98 Japan 115, 196 and Chinese science 235 “discovery” by American explorers 235 and guns 234–236 interwar politics 20–21, 170 Japanese rulers’ fear of Westernization 235 Meiji period 20 nuclear industry in 152 socialist movement 20 and space 141 Taisho period 20 and technological development 234–236 Tokugawa period 19, 236 utopianism in 19–20 Jasons (secret group) 105 Jaures, Jean 251, 253 Jefferson, Thomas 242 Jobs, Steve 158, 187, 201 Johnson, President Andrew 94 Johnson, President Lyndon 101, 104, 111, 159 Johnson, Steven 222 Jonestown, Guyana 244 Journey to the Center of the Earth (Verne) 8 Judaism 10 J-wear 141 K-12 school system 215 Edutopia 204 K-12 hardware and software 205–206 K-12 participants 206 Kaczynski, Theodore 84 Kahn, Albert 251, 252–253 Kahn, Herman 238 Kaplan, Fred 191 Karloff, Boris 128 Kateb, George 6–7 Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities 213–215, 216–17 Index 277 Kellogg Commission (Continued ) political and ideological components of report 215 Kellogg Foundation 213 Kelmscott Press 59 Keniston, Kenneth 116 Kennedy President John F 101, 104, 105–106, 111, 192 Kennedy, Senator Ted 104 Khang Yu-Wei 18–19 Kibbutzim, Israel 24, 196–198 Kilby, Jack 158 Kilgore, Senator Harley 100–101, 113, 115–116, 120 Kindle Reader 219, 220, 222 Kondratiev, Nikolai 30 Kondratiev theory 30–31 Koo, Wellington 252 Krauss, Lawrence 202–203 Kumar, Krishan 9–10, 92 Kusiak, Karen 205 labor unrest as a problem 31 Labour Party, UK 114 Lane, Mary E. Bradley 92 Lane, Robert 106–107, 108, 109, 114, 117–118, 119, 122 Laos 104 Lartigue, Jacques-Henri 165 Las Vegas 36 Lasser, David 9 Last Hero, The: A Life of Henry Aaron (Bryant) 191 Latin America 102 and European ideas 21–22 indigenous cultures and movements 21, 23 liberation theology and communities 52 Spanish conquest 21 utopias in 21–23 Lawrence, Francis 212 Lea, Homer 98 278 Index League of Nations 251 Lease, Mary 98 Lee, Ann 26 Lefkowitz, Mary 171 Left Hand of Darkness, The (LeGuin) 92 legitimation crisis in US science and technology 122 LeGuin, Ursula 92 LeMay, General Curtis 105 Lemontey, Pierre Edouard 60 Lenin, Vladimir 104 Lessing, Doris 9 Levitas, Ruth 7 Levittown, Long Island 244 Ley, Willy 9 library usage 218 Life in a Technocracy: What It Might Be Like in 1933 (Loeb) 89, 106, 239, 240 limits to growth 234, 237 Literary Digest 97 “literary intellectuals” 114 “living the dream” 254 Loeb, Harold Albert 89, 90, 95, 96, 239 and politics 109 Loewy, Raymond 34 London, Jack 98 Longxi, Zhang 18 Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (Bellamy) 10, 13, 24, 27, 31–32, 34, 90, 194 attitudes toward 59–60, 254 Lost Horizon 13 Lucas, George 204 Luddites 240, 241 Maastricht Treaty 252 Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, The (Leo Marx) 84 Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Adas) 169 Macnie, John 82, 87 Maine and nuclear power 142–157 Maine Yankee Atomic Power Company 142–143, 145, 146–148, 149, 151 as “cargo cult” 147 closure of 148 opposition to 156–157 referenda on 147, 155 utopian and dystopian aspects 156 views of 156–157 Malthus, Thomas 63 Mandela, Nelson 171 Manhattan Project 156 “Manifest Destiny,” American 11 Manuel, Frank and Fritzie 16 Manuel, Frank 6 Mao Tse-Tung 18, 243 utopian vision 19 Mao’s Great Famine (Dikotter) 19 Maraniss, David 191 marginalizing utopias 29, 245 Marx, Karl 32, 53, 60, 66–67, 105, 250–251 Marxism 22 Marx, Leo 84, 85 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 52 Massey, Ranymond 240, 241 Mauchly, John 160 Mayer, Anna-K. 98, 114 Mbeki, Thabo, President of South Africa 171 McDonald, Michael J. 111 McIntyre, Vonda N. 9 McKinley, President William 94 McNamara, Robert 104–105, 106, 112, 113, 166 “McNamara Line” 105 Medieval Machine, The: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (Gimpel) 236 “megachurches” 11 megaprojects: and climate change 187–188 retreat from 139ff, 157 skepticism toward 141–142 taxpayer support for 122, 150 Megatrends and Megatrends 2000 (Naisbitt and Aburdene) 168 Men Like Gods (Wells) 251 mercantilism 77 Metamorphosis (Ovid) 47 Mexico 23 mice, as subjects of research 125 Micklethwait, John 11 Microsoft 158, 192 “middle landscape” 85 military technology 238 millenarian movements 8 God and millenarianism 8, 10 Christians and millenarianism 8, 10 Judaism and millenarianism 8, 10 Mormonism 10 and Pansophism 54–55 and utopia 55 Miller, Lisa 12 Mitchell, General Billy 142 Mizora: A Prophecy (Lane) 92 Model T car 165 Modern Times in Maine and America, 1890–1930 191 “Modernization” theory 102ff, 114 over-reliance on technology 105 Index 279 Mojave Desert, California 151 monkeys, genetically modified 125 Montgomery, David 212 Montreal Expo 1967 246 Moon and the Ghetto: An Essay on Public Policy Analysis, The (Nelson) 117 Moon landing 139, 140, 141, 190, 200 moon landing fraud claims 141 More, Thomas 23, 42, 58, 247 coining of term utopia 5 and history 164 and utopias 251 utopia described 48–50 see also Utopia Morison, George Shattuck 89–90 Mormonism 10 Morozov, Evgeny 189 Morris, William 17, 32, 58–59, 60, 237, 254 see also News from Nowhere Mosquito Coast, The 202 Mumford, Lewis 1, 106, 245, 246 music, digitization of 221 Mussolini, Benito 98 MySpace 205 Naisbitt, John 161, 162, 168, 186 Nantucket Sound 150 NASA 7, 140 National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC) 213–214 National Park Service 238–239 National Science Foundation (NSF) 99, 100, 115 Native Americans 81 natural user interface 220 Nazi Germany 104, 244 Nazism and utopia 188 280 Index Negroponte, Nicholas 161–162, 163, 186 Nehru, Jawaharlal 172 Nelson, Richard 117 Neo-Confucian thought 19–20 Net Delusion, The: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (Morozov) 189 Neumann, Franz 109 Neumann, John Von 160 New Atlantis, The (Bacon) 53, 251 Condorcet on 56 New Christianity, The (Le Nouveau Christianisme) (SaintSimon) 57 New Deal 106, 159 New England 3, 24, 27, 147, 150, 156, 249 New Harmony, Indiana. settlement at 60 New Lanark Mills, Scotland 60, 62, 64 New View of Society A (Owen) 62 New World and Old World compared 24, 244 New World Order 242 New World, The; Or, Mechanical System to Perform the Labours of Man and Beast by Inanimate Powers, that Cost Nothing (Etzler) 78 New York City’s New School for Social Research 97 New York Public Library 242, 245, 254 New York World’s Fair World of Tomorrow 1939–1940 164, 240 News from Nowhere (Morris) 17, 32, 59–60, 237 newspapers and digital media 218, 221–222 Newton Message Pad 219 Newton, Isaac 55, 219 Nexi the robot 126 Nixon, President Richard 108, 155 Noble, David F 187, 190, 207, 216 non-utopian reform 244 North Americans, early European perceptions of 244 North Vietnam 105–106 Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (Lefkowitz) 171 Noyce, Robert 158 Noyes, John Humphrey 10, 27, 28 nuclear industry: France 152 Germany 152 Japan 152 US 142–156 nuclear power 142–157 being “too cheap to meter” 156 changing attitudes toward 146–147 experts and 155–156 leakage of tritium 153 and power station decommissioning 148, 149–150 possibility of disaster 154–155 nuclear weaponry 187 Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) 148, 149, 153, 154 Nutty Professor, The 201 Nye, David 81, 168, 169, 190, 237 Nyhan, David 148–149 O’Neil, Gerard 9 Obama, President Barack 140, 151 Office of Science and Technology Policy 108 Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) 117–119, 121 One Laptop per Child 161 Oneida community 10, 24, 27–28 daughter communities 28 open marriage in 27, 199 Oneida Limited 28 “Oneida Perfectionists” 28 ordinary readers and utopian writings 11, 139, 254 Organization Man, The (Whyte) 114–115 original sin 8 Orwell, George 14, 124, 166 Other America, The (Harrington) 101 Ovid 47 Owen, Robert 53, 60–64, 66, 67 and drawbacks of industrialization 62 influence on Japan 196 utopian plans 62–63 see also New Harmony, Indiana, New Lanark Mills ozone layer, monitoring of 121 pacifism 26 Packard, David 158 Page, Larry 158 Palestine 25, 35 Pansophists 48, 52, 53–55 Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labor, By Powers of Nature and Machinery, The (Etzler) 79 parents, children, and technology 239 Paris exposition 1937 35, 251–252 Paris Peace Conference 1919 251 Paris World’s Fair 1900 251, 253 Pasteur, Louis 120–121 Index 281 Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation (Stokes) 120 patriot missiles 238 Peale, Norman Vincent 168, 208 Pelle, Kimberly 36 Pentagon 109 People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Potter) 101 Performance Measurement for World Class Manufacturing 212 Perrin, Noel 234, 235 Perry, Commodore Matthew 20 Persian Gulf War 1991 238 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 11–12 Pew Research Center for the People 116 phalansteries 29, 64–65 Physics of Star Trek, The (Krauss) 202 Picasso, Pablo 35, 252 Piercy, Marge 92 Pilgrims, US 24 Pindar 47 Plato 13, 47, 48, 50, 123 podcast 218–219 Point East Maritime Village, Wiscasset 150 Pol Pot 243 “Politics of Consensus in an Age of Affluence, The” 106 politics, affluence, and knowledge 106–107 significance of political power 109 Positivism 58 Post Shredded Wheat 191 post-9/11 period 142 “post-colonial” critique of Western imperialism 169–173 post-Millennialists 8, 27 282 Index post-modern skepticism and relativism 160 Postrel, Virginia 161, 164, 186 post-World War II period, beliefs, and projects 160 Potter, David 101, 102 poverty and progress 82 Prague Spring 1968 268 Prakash, Gyan 171, 172 Preface to Democratic Theory, A (Dahl) 106 pre-Millennialists 8 Press and the American Association 116 primitivism 92 Productivity for the Academic World 212 Productivity Press 212 professional forecasting 160–169 failures of 160–161 Progress and Poverty (George) 82 proletariat 66 public faith in government and scientific-technological advance 113 Puffer, Erma 145 Puritans, US 24 “Quick Technological Fixes” 107–108, 117 Quindlen, Anna 221 racism 9, 169, 172 radiation, issues with 144–145, 155 Ramo, Simon 110–111, 112, 113, 122, 160 utopian vision of 110, 166 rationalism 55 Reactionary Modernism (Herf) 104 Read and Go 220 Reader Pocket Edition and Reader Touch Edition 220 Reagan, President Ronald 8, 108, 115, 140, 142, 248 real world and the internet 194–195 Recent Social Trends in the United States (Hoover) 102 recovery narrative 81, 237 Reevely, David 221–222 Religion of Technology, The: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (Noble) 187 religion 169 attitudes toward belief 56 declining beliefs 11–12 freedom of religion 168 religious beliefs and utopianism 9–12, 24, 29–30, 31, 90, 96, 239 in US 25, 26, 103 Western 172 Report to the County of Lanark (Owen) 62, 63 Republic (Plato) 13, 47, 48, 50, 123 Rescher, Nicholas 239–240 Research Applied to National Needs” 115 “Returning to Our Roots” 215, 216 Revenge of the Nerds 201 revolution of rising expectations 50 Ricardson, Ralph 240 Rittel, Horst 112 Road Ahead, The (Gates) 163 Robinson, Kim Stanley 9 robotics, development of 126–127 Roddenberry, Gene 200, 201, 202 Rodriquez, Simon 22 Roebling, John 79 Roemer, Kenneth 254 Rogers, Deborah 193 Rome 1960: The Olympics that Changed the World (Maraniss) 191 Roosevelt, President Franklin 102, 159 Rosas, Juan Manuel de 22 Rostow, Walt 104, 105 Roszak, Theodore 111, 112 Rural Electrification Administration 94 Ruskin, John 58, 59, 60 Russ, Joanna 92 Rydell, Robert 36, 37 94, Saddam Hussein 11 Saint-Simon, Henri de 22, 52, 56–58, 65, 66 Sale, Kirkpatrick 117 “salvation by technology” 248 Samurai “technology assessment” 235 Sargent, Lyman Tower 16, 253 Satellite (machine developed by Etzler) 79–80, 81 Saunders, Doug 105 Schindler, Solomon 10 Schuller, Robert 168 Science Advisory Committee 106 science and technology 57 science fiction 8–9, 199–203, and utopias 201 Science in the National Interest 119–122 Science Wars” 159 “science-driven globalization” 8 Science – The Endless Frontier (V.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charlie Hebdo massacre, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, deglobalization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, gig economy, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, obamacare, pattern recognition, post-truth, post-work, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Muslims and Jews are likely to be found in both camps, and to justify whichever position they espouse through imaginative interpretations of the Quran and the Talmud. Of course religious groups might harden their views on particular issues, and turn them into allegedly sacred and eternal dogmas. In the 1970s theologians in Latin America came up with Liberation Theology, which made Jesus look a bit like Che Guevara. Similarly, Jesus can easily be recruited to the debate on global warming, and make current political positions look as if they are eternal religious principles. This is already beginning to happen. Opposition to environmental regulations is incorporated into the fire-and-brimstone sermons of some American Evangelical pastors, while Pope Francis is leading the charge against global warming, in the name of Christ (as witnessed in his second encyclical, ‘Laudato si’).2 So perhaps by 2070, on the environmental question it will make all the difference in the world whether you are Evangelical or Catholic.

…

N. 310, 315–16 Good Samaritan parable 57 Google 31, 36, 39, 40, 41, 48, 53–4, 68, 77, 78, 90, 91, 178, 282; Glass 92; Maps 54, 55; Translate 262 gorilla 94–5, 98 Gove, Michael 46 Great Barrier Reef, Australian 116 Great Depression 251 Great Ukrainian Famine (1932–3) 33, 238 Greece 13, 154–5, 181; ancient 52, 95–6, 177, 181, 182, 291 greenhouse gases 117, 119 groupthink 218–20, 230 Guardian 306 Guevara, Che 9–10, 11, 133 Gulf War, First (1990–91) 172, 174 Haber, Fritz 194, 195 Haiti 150 Hamas 173 HaMevaser 97 Hammurabi 188 Hamodia 97 happiness xiv, 41–2, 201, 202, 211, 245, 251, 252, 273, 309 Harry Potter 234 Hastings, Battle of (1066) 178–9 Hayek, Friedrich 130, 131 healthcare 11, 16, 40, 112; AI and 22–3, 24–5, 28, 48–9, 50, 106–7; basic level of 41; religion and 128, 129 Hebrew Old Testament 184–96 Hillel the Elder, Rabbi 190 Hinduism 105, 108, 127, 129, 131, 133, 134, 181, 186, 191, 200, 203, 208, 235, 269– 70, 278, 283–4, 285, 291 Hirohito, Emperor of Japan 235 Hiroshima, atomic bombing of (1945) 112, 115, 178 Hitler, Adolf 9, 11, 66–7, 96, 108, 178, 211, 231, 237, 295 Holocaust 184, 236, 248, 272, 293 Holocene 116 hominids 110, 122 Homo Sapiens: communities, size of 90, 110, 111; disappearance of 122; emergence of 185; emotions and decision-making 58; as post-truth species 233, 238–9, 242; religion and 185, 188, 198; as storytelling animal 269, 275; superhumans and 41, 75, 246; working together in groups 218 homosexuality 50, 61, 135, 200, 205–6, 300 Hsinbyushin, King of Burma 305 Hugh of Lincoln 235–6 human rights xii, 4, 11, 15, 44, 93, 95, 96, 101, 211–12, 306 human sacrifice 289 humility 180, 181–96; ethics before the Bible and 186–90; Jews/Judaism and 182–96; monotheism and 190–3; religion and 181–96; science and 193–5 Hungary 169 hunter-gatherers 73, 100, 108, 111, 147, 187, 218, 224, 226, 230 Hussein, Saddam 180 Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World 251–5 IBM 23, 29, 30–1 identity, mass: religion and 133–7 ignorance 217–22; individuality and 218, 219–20; knowledge illusion, the 218–19; power and 220–2; rationality and 217–18 illness 48–9, 69, 129, 134 immigration xi, 4, 16, 93–4, 108, 115, 138, 139–55 imperialism 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 63, 79, 106, 136, 145, 178, 191–2, 212 Inca 289 incest, secular ethics and 205, 206 India 4, 10, 15, 39, 74, 76, 100, 106, 109, 113, 115, 127, 131, 181, 182, 183, 184, 191, 192, 193, 260, 266, 285–6, 310, 315 Indian Pala Empire 139 individuality: AI and 22, 23, 27; myth of 218–20 Indonesia 10, 14, 26, 102–3, 105 Industrial Revolution 16, 19, 33, 34, 74, 186, 266 inequality see equality information technology/infotech xii, 1, 6, 7, 16, 17, 21, 33, 48, 66, 80–1, 83, 120–1, 176 inorganic life, creation of xii, 78, 122, 246 Inoue, Nissho 305 Inside Out (movie) 249–51, 267 Instagram 301 Institution of Mechanical Engineers 118 intelligence, consciousness and ix, 68–70, 122, 245–6 see also artificial intelligence (AI) International Olympic Committee (IOC) 104 Internet 6, 15, 40, 65, 71, 73, 88, 122, 232, 246, 263 intuition 20–1, 47 Iran 90, 94, 106, 107–8, 120, 130–1, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 173, 181, 200, 289 Iran-Iraq War (1980) 173 Iraq 5, 13, 94, 106, 159, 165, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 210, 219, 288, 295, 296 Islam xi, 13, 15, 17–18, 87, 93–4, 96, 97–8, 101, 106, 107, 126, 127, 133, 137, 161, 168, 169, 177, 181, 183, 184, 186, 191, 196, 199, 248, 289, 295, 296 Islamic fundamentalism 87, 93–4, 97–8, 101, 106, 107, 161, 177, 188, 191, 199, 248, 295, 296 Islamic State 93, 94, 97–8, 101, 106, 107, 177, 188, 191, 199, 248, 295, 296 Isonzo, tenth Battle of the (1917) 160 Israel 15, 42–3, 64–5, 88, 97, 101, 103, 106, 107, 108, 111, 122, 130, 131, 134, 135, 137, 138, 141–2, 160, 163, 173–4, 182, 183–4, 186, 189, 190, 191, 221, 224, 233, 242, 272, 274–5, 277, 290, 294 Israel Defence Forces (IDF) 173 Italy 38, 103, 172, 173, 179, 251, 292, 294, 295 Ivory Coast 103, 188 Japan 13, 54, 107, 119, 120, 135–7, 139, 148, 161, 162, 171, 173, 179–80, 182, 184, 186, 232, 235, 251, 285, 305–6 Jerusalem 15, 57, 165, 183, 239, 274, 279, 298 Jesus 108, 128, 131, 133, 187, 190, 212–13, 237, 283, 284, 289, 291–2, 306 Jewish Enlightenment 194 Jewish Great Revolt (66–70 ad) 239 Jews/Judaism 8, 15, 42–3, 57, 58, 96–7, 131, 132, 134, 137, 138, 142, 182–7, 188, 189–96, 208, 233, 235–6, 239, 272, 273–4, 279, 284, 289–90 jobs: AI and xiii, 8, 18, 19–43, 59–60, 63, 109, 259–68; education and 259–68; immigration and 139, 141, 149, 152 Johnson, Boris 46 Johnson, Lyndon B. 113, 114 Joinville, Jean de 296 Juche 137 Judah 189 judiciary 4, 44 justice xiii, 188–9, 222, 223–30, 270, 277, 288; complex nature of modern world and 223– 8; effort to know and 224; morality of intentions and 225–6; roots of sense of 223 kamikaze 136 Kanad, Acharya 181 Kant, Immanuel 58–9, 60 Karbala, Iraq 288, 289 Kasparov, Garry 29, 31 KGB 48, 299 Khan, Genghis 175, 179 Khomeini, Ayatollah 130, 131, 288 Kidogo (chimpanzee) 187–8 Kim Il-sung 137 Kim Jong-Il 180 Kim Jong-Un 64 Kinsey scale 50 Kiribati, Republic of 119, 120 Kita, Ikki 305 knowledge illusion, the 218–19 Korea 104, 135, 137, 171, 180, 275, 285 Labour Party 45 Laozi 190, 267 Leave campaign 46 Lebanon 173 Leviticus 189 LGBT 135, 200 liberalism/liberal democracy xii, xiv, xv, 3–4, 33, 46, 55, 141, 154–5, 210, 217, 237, 301; AI and 6–9, 17–8, 43, 44–72, 217, 220, 230; alternatives to 5, 11–15, 17; birth of 33; choice and 45–6, 297–300; crisis/loss of faith in x, xi, xiv–xv, 1, 3–18, 44, 45, 46, 55, 141; crises faced by, periodic 9–18; education and 261;elections/referendums and 45–6, 210–11; equality and 74, 76, 80; immigration and 4, 138, 141, 142–3, 144; individual, faith in 44–9, 55, 217, 220, 230, 297–302; liberty and 44–72; meaning of life stories and 297–302; nationalism and 11, 14–15, 112; reinvention of 16–17; secular ethics and 210 Liberation Theology 133 liberty xii, xiii, 3, 4, 10–11, 17, 44–72, 83, 108, 204, 211, 299; AI future development and 68–72; authority shift from humans to AI 43, 44–72, 78, 268; decision-making and 47–61; digital dictatorships and 61–8; free will/feelings, liberal belief in 44–6 Libya 5, 172, 173 life expectancy 41, 107, 109, 260, 264, 265 Life of Brian (film) 186, 220 Lincoln Cathedral 236 Lincoln, Abraham 12 Lion King, The (movie) 270–1, 273, 275–6, 297, 299 Lockerbie bombing, Pan Am flight 103 (1988) 160 Lody (chimpanzee) 187–8 logic bombs 77, 178 Louis IX, King of France 296 Louis XIV, King of France 66, 96 Louis XVI, King of France 207 Lucas, George 298 Luhansk People’s Republic 232 machine learning 8, 19, 25, 30, 31, 33, 64, 65, 67, 245, 267, 268 Mahabharata 181 Mahasatipatthana Sutta 303 Mahavira 190 Maimonides 193 Maji Maji Rebellion (1905–7) 239 Mali 229 Manchester Arena bombing (May, 2017) 160 Manchukuo 232 Manchuria 180 Mansoura, Battle of (1250) 296 Markizova, Gelya 237 martyrs 287–9, 295–6 Marx, Karl 94, 130, 131, 133, 209, 210, 213, 246, 248, 262; The Communist Manifesto 262, 273 Marxism 15, 137, 209–10, 213 Marxism-Leninism 12, 137 Mashhad, Iran 289 Mass, Christian ceremony of 283 Matrix, The (movie) 245, 246–8, 249, 255 Maxim gun 178 May, Theresa 114 Maya 186, 193 McIlvenna, Ted 200 meaning xiii–xiv, 269–308; Buddhism and 302–6; stories and 269–83, 291–8, 301–2, 306–8; individual/liberalism and 297–302; rituals and 283–91; romance and 280–1; successful stories 276–7 meat, clean 118–19 media: government control of 12–13; post-truth and 238; terrorism and 166, 167 Meir, Golda 233 Merkel, Angela 95, 96, 97 Mesha Stele 191 Mesopotamia 189 Methodism 200 #MeToo movement xi, 164 Mexican border wall 8 Mexican-American war (1846–48) 172 Mexico 8, 106, 151, 172, 260, 261, 266 Mickiewicz, Adam 307 Middle East 13, 15, 78, 106, 139, 142, 143, 161, 173, 175, 177, 188, 193, 199, 296 Mill, John Stuart 58, 60 Milwaukee County Zoo 187 mind, meditation and 310–18 Mishra, Pankaj 94 Mitsui 305 Moab 191 Modi, Narendra 114, 179 morality see justice Moses, prophet 186–7, 188–9, 274 movies, AI and 51–2, 69, 245–51, 255, 267, 268 Mubarak, Hosni 63 Muhammad, Prophet 15, 94, 181, 182, 187, 288 Mumbai x, 17 Murph (chimpanzee) 188 music, AI and 25–8 Muslims 13, 55, 62, 63, 93–4, 96, 98, 100, 104, 107, 130–3, 134, 143, 145, 148, 150, 152, 153, 165, 172, 181, 184, 185, 190, 191, 193, 200, 203–4, 208, 230, 233, 235, 271–2, 284, 288, 292, 295, 296, 306 Mussolini, Benito 295 My Lai massacre (1968) 62, 63 Myanmar 306 Nakhangova, Mamlakat 237–8 nanotechnology 76 national liberation movements 10 nationalism xi, 14, 83, 109, 110–26, 132, 160, 176–7, 179, 181, 230, 241, 309; AI and 120–6; benefits of 111–12; ecological crisis and xi, 115–20, 121, 122–3, 124; Europe and 124–5; fascism and 292–5; ideology, lack of unifying 176–7; liberalism, as alternative to 11–15, 17, 112; nostalgia and 14–15; nuclear weapons and 112–15, 121–2, 123, 124; origins of 110–12; post-truth and 231–3; religion and 137–8, 305, 307; rituals/sacrifice and 286–8, 292–5; story and meaning of 272, 273–5, 276, 277–8, 280, 286–7, 292–5, 306–8; suffering and 306–8; technology and 120–2, 123–4 National Rifle Association (NRA) 291–2 Native American Indians 79, 147, 185, 186, 191 NATO 175, 177, 231 natural selection 58, 93, 94, 122 Nazi Germany 10, 66, 96, 134, 136, 212, 213, 226, 237, 251, 279, 295 Nepal 103 Netanyahu, Benjamin 173, 179, 221 Netflix 52, 55 Netherlands 10, 14, 38, 186 neuroscience 20 New York Times 243 New Zealand 76, 105 Ngwale, Kinjikitile 239 Nigeria 90, 101, 103, 127, 159, 165 Nile: Basin 113; River 111; Valley 172, 296 9/11 159, 160, 161, 162–3, 166, 168, 195 Nobel Prize 193, 194, 195 North Korea 4, 64, 106, 107–8, 137, 138, 169, 171, 178 Northern Ireland: Troubles 132 nuclear weapons/war 14, 34, 107–8, 112–15, 116, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 137, 138, 154, 165, 167–70, 178, 179, 181 Nuda, Yuzu 54 nurses 24, 107 Obama, Barack 4, 12, 15–16, 98, 151, 168 oligarchy 12–13, 15, 76, 176 Olympics: (1016) (Medieval) 103–5; (1980) 103; (1984) 103; (2016) 101–2; (2020) 105; Christian emperors suppress 192 opportunity costs 168 Orthodox Christianity 13, 15, 137, 138, 183, 237, 282, 308 Orwell, George 63, 64; Nineteen Eighty-Four 52, 252 Oscar (chimpanzee) 188 Ottoman Empire 153 Pakistan 102, 153, 159, 200, 286 Palestinians 64–5, 101, 103, 160, 233, 274, 275, 282 Paris terror attacks (November, 2015) 160, 295–6 Parks, Rosa 207, 299 Passover 284 Pasteur, Louis 299 pattern recognition 20 Pearl Harbor attack (1941) 135, 161, 162 Pegu, King of 305 Pentagon 162 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) 178 Peter the Great 175 Phelps, Michael 102 Philippines 127, 161 phosphorus 116 Picasso, Pablo 299 Pixar 249–50 Plato 181, 182 Pokémon Go 92 Poland 15, 103, 137, 142, 169, 177, 186, 231, 279–80, 307–8 polar regions, ice melt in 117 post-truth xiii, 230, 231–45; action in face of 242–4; branding/advertising and 238; history of 231–3; Homo Sapiens as post-truth species 233–6; knowledge and belief, line between 240–2; nation states and 236–8; scientific literature and 243–4; truth and power, relationship between 241–2; uniting people and 239–40 Pravda 237, 243 Princeton Theological Seminary 57 Protestants 108, 132, 213 Putin, Vladimir 12, 13, 15, 80, 114, 175, 176, 177, 231, 232, 233, 238 Qatar 142 Qin Dynasty 171 Quran 127, 130, 131, 132, 181, 198, 233, 235, 272, 298 racism 60, 137, 141, 142, 146, 147, 150–2, 154, 182, 185, 190, 226 Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli 286 rationality 45, 47, 180, 217–18, 219, 220, 282 Reagan, Ronald 44 refugees x, 117, 123, 140, 141, 142, 144, 147, 148, 155, 205 regulation: AI and 6, 22, 34–5, 61, 77–81, 123; environmental 118, 130, 133, 219, 225 religion xi–xii, xiii, 14, 17, 46, 57, 83, 106, 108, 126, 127–38, 160, 248, 255, 260; authority and 46–7; community and 89, 91; distortions of ancient traditions and 96–8; economics and 33, 106; future of humanity and 127–8; God/gods and see God and gods; humility and 181–96; identity and 128, 133–7; immigration and 141–3, 144, 153; meaning of life stories and see meaning; meditation and 315–16; monotheism, birth of 190–3; nationalism and 15, 17, 137–8, 309; policy problems (economics) and 128, 130–3; post-truth and 233–7, 239, 241; science and 127–30, 193–5; secularism and see secularism; technical problems (agriculture) and 127–30; unemployment and 42–3 see also under individual religion name renewable energy 118, 120, 127, 128–30 robots 249, 250; inequality and 76–7; jobs/work and 19, 22, 24, 29–30, 34, 36, 37, 39, 42; as soldiers 61–8, 76–7, 168; war between humans and 70, 246 Rokia 229 Roman Empire 177, 184, 191, 192, 235, 239, 282 Romania 103, 169 Russia 5, 9, 12–13, 15, 64, 76, 100, 101, 105, 113, 114, 119–20, 122, 134, 135, 137, 137, 138, 139, 168–9, 171, 174–7, 179, 182, 231–2, 236, 237, 238, 242, 248, 251, 260, 277, 294, 307, 308 see also Soviet Union Sabbath, Jewish 188, 189, 290 sacrifice 60–1, 91, 112, 120, 136, 141, 182, 190, 274, 275, 279, 283–91, 302–3, 305, 307, 308 Sanders, Bernie 292 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harari) 183 Saudi Arabia 102, 120, 131, 134, 135, 137, 139, 148 science fiction 51, 61, 68–9, 70, 244, 245–55; Brave New World 251–5; free will, Inside Out and concept of 249–51; intelligence with consciousness, confusion of 68–9, 246; mind’s inability to free itself from manipulation 245–55; ‘self’, definition of and 255; technology used to manipulate/control human beings, outlines dangers of 246–9; The Matrix 245, 246–8, 249, 255; The Truman Show 246–7, 248, 255, 268 scientific literature 243–4 Scientific Revolution 193, 195 Scotland: independence referendum (2014) 124–5 Second World War (1939–45) 3, 10, 11, 100, 123, 124, 179–80, 184, 293 secularism 42, 127, 130, 143, 183, 194, 195, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203–14, 229–30, 290; compassion and 205–6; courage and 207–8; definition of 203; equality and 206–7; freedom and 207; secular ideal/ethics of 204–9; Stalin and 209–10, 212 Serbia 175, 275, 276, 282 sexuality: AI and 50; law and 61; liberalism and 299; religion and 200, 300; secularism and 205–6 Shakespeare, William 25, 55–6, 252; Hamlet 297 Shechtman, Dan 194 Shiite Muslims 131, 134, 137, 138, 288–9 Shinto 135–7, 186 Shulhan Arukh (code of Jewish law) 195 Shwedagon Pagoda, Burma 305 Siam 304–5 Sikhs 186, 284 Silicon Valley 39, 76, 85, 178, 217, 299 skin colour 151, 152 slavery 96, 148, 151, 177, 226 Sloman, Steven 218 smart bomb 136 social media 50 solar energy 119, 120 soldiers, AI and 61–8, 76–7, 168 Somme, Battle of the (1 July, 1916) 160 Song Empire, Chinese 104, 259 South Africa 13, 76 South East Asia 100 South Korea 13, 120 Soviet Union 5, 8, 9, 10, 15, 48, 65, 103, 114, 169, 172, 174–5, 176, 209–10, 237–8, 248, 279, 280, 299 see also Russia Spain 48, 124, 125, 236, 260, 289 Spanish Inquisition 48, 96, 199, 212, 213, 289, 299 speciation (divergence of mankind into biological castes or different species) 76 Spinoza 193 Srebrenica massacre (1995) 62–3 St Paul the Apostle 190 Stalin, Joseph 66, 67, 96, 175, 176, 209–10, 211, 212, 237, 238, 243 Stockfish 8 31 Stone Age 73, 86, 182, 187, 217, 218, 233 stress 32, 57, 264 strongmen 5, 165 Suez Canal 172 suffering: AI and xii, 49; Buddhism and 303–4; fake news and 242; meditation and 309, 313; nation states and 307–8; reality and 242, 286–7, 306–8; sacrifice and 287, 289; secular ethics and 201, 205–9 Sumerian city states 188 Sunni Muslims 104, 131, 134 superhumans 41, 75, 211–12, 246 surveillance systems 63–5 Sweden 101, 105, 112, 141 Syria 13, 29, 93, 94, 106, 114, 139, 141, 147, 148, 159, 171, 173, 175, 176, 223, 228, 261, 295, 296 Taiwan 100, 102, 104, 135 Taliban 30, 101, 153 Talmud 42, 43, 97, 132, 183, 186, 189, 193, 235 Tasmanians, aboriginal 227 tax 6, 37, 40, 90–1, 105, 118, 130, 205, 286, 291 Tea Party 219, 291 technology 87; animal welfare and 118–19; ecological collapse and 118–19, 122–3; education and 266–8; equality and 72–81; human bodies and 88–9; liberal democracy and 6–9, 16, 17–18; liberty and 44–72; nationalism and 120–4; science fiction and 245–55; threat from future xii–xiii, xiv, 1–81, 123, 176, 178–9, 245–55, 259–68; war and 99–100, 123, 176, 178–9; work and 19–43 see also artificial intelligence (AI) and under individual are of technology Tel el-Kebir, Battle of (1882) 172 television, AI and 51–2 Temple of Yahweh, Jerusalem 15 Ten Commandments 186, 187, 199, 291 Tencent (technology company) 40, 41, 77 terrorism: AI and 65, 69; etymology 159; fear of xi, xiii, 93, 155, 159–70, 217, 237, 249; media and 166, 167, 170; nuclear weapons 167–70; numbers killed by 23, 159; state reaction to 163–7; strategy of 159–63; suicide/martyrdom 295–6 Tesla 59, 60–1 Thatcher, Margaret 44–5 Theodosian Decrees (391) 192 Theodosius, Roman Emperor 192 Third World War see war 3-D printers 39 Tibet 232 Tiranga (tricolor) (Indian national flag) 285–6 Tojo, General 180 Torah 190, 194 trolley problems 57, 60 Truman Show, The (movie) 246–7, 248, 255, 268 Trump, Donald xi, 5, 8, 9, 11, 14–15, 40, 114, 150–1, 232, 233, 312 truth 12, 54, 215–55; Google and 54; ignorance and 217–22; justice and 223–30; meditation and see meditation; nationalism and 277–8, 293; post-truth and xiii, 231–45; reality and 306–8; science fiction and 245–55; secular commitment to 204–14; suffering and 308 Tsuyoshi, Inukai 305 Tunisia xi Turkey 5, 15, 127, 141, 169, 181, 260 Twitter 91, 235, 238 Ukraine 33, 101, 114, 169, 174, 176, 177, 219, 231–2, 238, 242 ultra-Orthodox Jews 42–3, 97, 195 Umayyad caliphs 94 unemployment 8, 18, 19, 21, 30, 32–3, 34, 37, 43 see also jobs United Nations 15, 101; Declaration of Human Rights 211 United States 4, 5, 8, 11, 14–15, 24, 29, 33, 39, 40, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 76, 79, 94, 96, 99–100, 103–4, 106, 107, 108, 113, 114, 115, 118, 119, 120, 121, 127, 130, 131, 133, 135, 136, 142, 145, 147, 150–1, 152, 159, 161, 162, 165, 168, 169, 172, 173, 175, 177, 178, 182, 185, 191, 194, 200, 219, 227, 230, 231, 236, 242, 275 Universal Basic Income (UBI) 37–43 universe, age of 274 university, deciding what to study at 54–5 University of Oxford 310 US Air Force (USAF) 29, 30 useless class 18, 30, 32, 121 US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration 24 US presidential election: (1964) 113, 114; (2016) 8, 85 Vedas 127, 131, 132, 198, 235, 240, 298 Victoria, Queen 15, 178 Vietnam 14, 100, 104, 176, 285 Vietnam War (1955–75) 62, 63, 100, 172, 173 violence: ethics and 200–2; nationalism and 112; number of deaths attributed to 16, 114; terrorism and see terrorism; war and see war Vipassana meditation 310, 312, 315–16 Vishwamitra 181 Wahhabism 137 Waksman, Selman 194 Walt Disney Pictures 249–51, 267, 270 war xi, xiii, 138, 170, 171–80; AI and 61–8, 123–4; economy and 177–9; possibility of 123–4, 138, 170, 171–80; religion and 138; spreads ideas, technology and people 99–100; stupidity/folly and 179–80; successful wars, decline in number of 171–80; technological disruption increases likelihood of 123–4 Warmland (fictional nation) 148–50, 152–4 War on Terror 168 Watson (IBM computer system) 20–1 weapons 123, 136, 212, 224–5; autonomous weapons systems 63; nuclear 14, 34, 107–8, 112–15, 116, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 137, 138, 154, 165, 167–70, 178, 179, 181; terrorism and see terrorism; weapons of mass destruction xiv, 167–70 welfare state xii, 10–11, 76 West Bank 64–5, 224 White Memorial Retreat Center, California 200 Wilhelm II, Kaiser 95, 96 William the Conqueror 178–9 Willow (movie) 298 Wirathu, Ashin 306 work/employment, AI and 18, 19–43 see also jobs World Health Organization (WHO) 22–3 Wright brothers 181, 299 Xi Jinping 12 Yahweh 15, 191, 291 Yemen 173, 195 YouTube 50, 102 Yugoslavia 169 Zakkai, Rabbi Yochanan ben 195 Zen meditation 305–6 Zionism 111, 184, 233, 272, 273–4, 276, 279 Zuckerberg, Mark 80, 81, 85–6, 87, 88, 89–90, 93 @vintagebooks penguin.co.uk/vintage This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law.

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever by Christopher Hitchens

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, index card, Isaac Newton, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, phenotype, Plato's cave, risk tolerance, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics

Far from being a truly independent guide to moral conduct, the Bible is more like a Rorschach test: which passages people choose to emphasize reflects as much as it shapes their moral character and interests. Moral considerations, then, should draw theists inexorably away from fundamentalism and toward liberal theology—that is, toward forms of theism that deny the literal truth of the Bible and that attribute much of its content to ancient confusion, credulity, and cruelty. Only by moving toward liberal theology can theists avoid refutation at the hands of the moralistic argument that is thought to undermine atheism. Only in this way can theists affirm that the heinous acts supposedly committed or commanded by God and reported in the Bible are just plain morally wrong.

…

This shows that these sources of extraordinary evidence are deeply unreliable. They can’t be trusted. So not only should we think that they offer no independent support for moral claims, but we should not think they offer independent support for theological claims. Against this, defenders of liberal theology need to argue that the claims derived from these extraordinary sources fall into two radically distinct groups. In one group, there are the purported revelations that assert moral error, which should not be accepted as having come from God and offer no independent support for any claim about God.

Rethinking Islamism: The Ideology of the New Terror by Meghnad Desai

Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, global village, illegal immigration, income per capita, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, Yom Kippur War

.฀ Marxism฀ became฀ the฀ most฀ powerful฀ ideology฀of฀the฀twentieth฀century฀because฀it฀offered฀a฀millenarian฀ hope฀and฀a฀programme฀to฀achieve฀it.฀Other฀ideologies฀–฀anarchism,฀ nationalism,฀Nazism฀–฀also฀flourished฀as฀programmatic฀devices฀for฀ liberation฀or฀for฀restoration฀of฀national฀pride. Religion฀did฀not฀quite฀disappear฀from฀the฀field฀of฀social฀reform฀ however.฀In฀Latin฀America,฀liberation฀theology฀was฀a฀strong฀move- ฀ ฀  ment฀which฀involved฀the฀Church฀in฀reform฀programmes,฀often฀in฀ defiance฀ of฀ the฀ state.฀ The฀ Catholic฀ Church฀ maintained฀ an฀ active฀ social฀ profile฀ partly฀ as฀ a฀ counter฀ to฀ Communism฀ but฀ also฀ to฀ respond฀ to฀ the฀ expectations฀ of฀ its฀ followers฀ for฀ an฀ answer฀ to฀ the฀ myriad฀ social฀ problems฀ they฀ had.฀ Religion฀ became฀ a฀ social฀ but฀ unofficial฀ activity฀ as฀ it฀ took฀ part฀ in฀ reform.฀ What฀ distinguishes฀ Islamism฀ from฀ such฀ efforts฀ is฀ that฀ it฀ is฀ a฀ political฀ ideology฀ with฀ a฀ programme฀ which฀ is฀ explicitly฀ related฀ to฀ power฀ relations.฀ It฀ is฀ this฀which฀has฀surprised฀many฀people฀who฀mistake฀it฀for฀a฀religion฀ seeking฀political฀power.

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise by Bethany Moreton

affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, estate planning, eternal september, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invisible hand, liberation theology, longitudinal study, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, price anchoring, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, walkable city, Washington Consensus, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Works Progress Administration

“If one is prepared to meet the Lord we Â�shouldn’t be overly concerned about leaving the world,” he reasoned, while a physics professor pointed out that human beings could “adapt” to low-level radiation.35 Although spiritual matters tended to trump geopolitics regularly at all three schools, and the argument for Christian aloofness could command a respectful hearing, the events of the 1980s could intrude in terms readily legible to Christian audiences. The orÂ�gaÂ�nized movement opposing Reagan’s Central America policies, after all, had firm bases in a vaÂ�riÂ�ety of Christian institutions and orÂ�gaÂ�niÂ�zaÂ�tions, including not only Catholic communities inspired by liberation theology but also the pacifist evangelical Left.36 A case in point was Dennis Godby, a native Californian and Catholic who had worked on hunger issues in Central America and who raised the area’s concerns for the College of the Ozarks in 1985. Godby had become convinced that the administration’s policies in the isthmus were unjustly costing thousands of lives and conceived of an “Emergency Run for Central America” to draw attention to the crisis.

…

See Management theory 363 INDEX Investment capÂ�ital, 24–25, 28, 31, 34, 37, 45, 53, 223 Investor-managers, 25, 53 Ixtapalapa Wal-Mart, 256, 258, 260–261 184–185, 213; proportion of Â�women in labor force, 296n1, 311n102, See also Industrial work; Service work; Â�Unions Labor-HEW Appropriations Act, 319n40 Laissez-faire, 4, 32, 70, 126, 146, 182, 194, 218 Lausanne movement, 239–240, 250, 340n69 Leadership training, 178–179, 181, 183, 189, 192, 240. See also Servant leadership Leaders of the Ozarks, 191–192, 201, 213 Lewis Galindo, Gabriel, 227–228, 242 Liability: limited, 13; crisis, 205–207 Liberal arts education, 139, 148–149, 151, 153, 155, 161, 187 Liberalism, 10, 87, 112, 116, 312n2 Liberation theology, 232 Libertarianism, 194 Lluvias de Gracia, 235 Lobbying, 20, 40, 185, 202, 204, 213–214, 257 Lott, Trent, 269 Loveless, Ron, 6–7 Lubbock Christian University, 174, 200, 204, 207, 217 Luxemburg, Rosa, 201 Lynn, Loretta, 43 J.B. Hunt Transport, 34, 46 J.C. Penney chain stores, 25, 47, 80 Jabara, Fran, 155–158, 161 Jesus Christ, 102, 106–107, 110–111, 121, 132, 143, 188, 238–239 Jesus Movement, 97 Jews, 11, 20–22 Job discrimination, 65, 82, 89, 99 John Brown University (formerly John E.

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, David Graeber, different worldview, do-ocracy, feminist movement, garden city movement, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Howard Zinn, intentional community, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, the market place, union organizing, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

In its syndicalist form it continues to appeal to the most progressive urban workers while anarchist communism echoes the ancient aspiration of the poorest peasants to work the land in common without interference from boss or priest. New libertarian tendencies have emerged in the ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ of the Brazilian educationist Paulo Freire and in Ivan Illich’s search for institutional alternatives to the centralized, technocratic State.30 The Liberation Theology developing in Latin America, which combines Marxism and Christianity, and juxtaposes images of Che and Jesus to potent effect in the shanty-towns, has a strong libertarian impulse which may well leave its historical roots behind.31 It is still not impossible that one day genuine anarchy will rise out of the chaos of military dictatorships in Latin America.

…

., pp. 79–80 29 Che Guevara, Socialism and Man (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1968), p. 22 30 See Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), and Ivan Illich’s Celebration of Awareness (1971) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) 31 See Linda H. Damico, The Anarchist Dimension of Liberation Theology (New York: P. Lang, 1987) Chapter Thirty-Four 1 See Jack Gray, Modern China in Search of a Political Form (Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 345 2 See Martin Bernal, ‘The Triumph of Anarchism over Marxism, 1906–1907’, China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1906–1913, ed. Mary C.

…

(Paris: Didier Erudition, 1986) Crowder, George, Classical Anarchism: The Political Thought of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin (New York: Oxford University Presss, 1992) Crump, John, Origins of Socialist Thought in Japan (Croom Helm, 1983) D’Agostino, Anthony, Marxism and the Russian Anarchists (San Francisco: Germinal Press, 1977) Damico, Linda H., The Anarchist Dimension of Liberation Theology (New York: Lang, 1987) Davis, J. C., Fear, Myth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) Day, Richard, Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Contributions to the Newest Social Movements (Pluto Press, 2005) De Jasay, A., Against Government: On Government, Anarchy and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1997) De Leon, David, The American as Anarchist: Reflections on Indigenous Radicalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) De Souza, Newton Stadler, O anarquismo da Colônia Cecília (Rio de Janeiro, 1970) Dirlik, Arif, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) Doctor, Adi Hormusji, Anarchist Thought in India (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1964) Doctor, Adi Hormusji, Sarvodaya: A Political and Economic Study (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, n.d.)

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Although John XXIII died of stomach cancer before the study was completed, momentum for change seemed great; even his more conservative successor, Pope Paul VI, continued Vatican II and expanded the contraception study, and it was widely assumed that the Church’s proscription on birth control would be overturned. That was especially true in Latin America, where the divergent spirits of Vatican II and the Cuban revolution intersected in a movement called Liberation Theology. Throughout the region, nuns doffed their habits and dressed like the people they served, and priests preached against social and economic injustice. Liberation Theology’s defense of the oppressed especially embraced women. Amid this exhilaration, the introduction of oral contraceptives into Costa Rica and its Latin American neighbors met only token opposition from Catholic clergy.

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

We need to re-member — to come back together, to recall what has happened, and to cultivate what Bhikkhu Bodhi calls “conscientious compassion,” awakening new visions: A collective voice might emerge that could well set in motion the forces needed to articulate and embody a new paradigm rooted in the intrinsic dignity of the person and the interdependence of all life on Earth. Such collaboration could serve to promote the alternative values that offer sane alternatives to our free-market imperatives of corporatism, exploitation, extraction, consumerism, and toxic economic growth.32 This approach is the mindful equivalent of liberation theology, allying spiritual practice with radical action. This begins with us bearing witness to shared vulnerabilities, actively acknowledging social suffering, collective trauma and other cultural experiences of oppression. Doing so rebuilds trust and empathy, developing capacities for resistance.

Respectable: The Experience of Class by Lynsey Hanley

Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Etonian, full employment, housing crisis, illegal immigration, intentional community, invisible hand, liberation theology, low skilled workers, meritocracy, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent

We have to put the people in this country first.’18) In 2011 Glasman announced that Labour would not be able truly to connect with lost or disgruntled working-class voters unless it were to be seen ‘reaching out’ to the racist, xenophobic English Defence League. At around the same time, Glasman and Cruddas developed a working formula for their party’s future appeal to working-class voters based on ‘family, faith and flag’. Cruddas, from a working-class Catholic family, framed his ideas around Catholic social teaching and liberation theology, which taken together emphasize mutuality, commitment and social continuity. Glasman, for his part, had worked with immigrants from South America, West Africa and Eastern Europe at the East London Communities Organisation (TELCO), through which he developed and led the London Citizens campaign to improve wages and conditions for workers in the East End of London.

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, centre right, clean water, company town, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, jitney, jobless men, Kibera, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent control, structural adjustment programs, surplus humans, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor

In the face of absolute immiseration, anthropologists describe the dissolution of the 72 Devisch, "Frenzy, Violence, and Ethical Renewal in Kinshasa," p. 625. 73 Abdou Maliq Simone, p. 24. 74 Sedecias Kakule interviewed in "Democratic Republic of the Congo: Torture and Death of an Eight-Year-Old Child," Federation Internationale de L'Acat (Action des Christiens pour L'Abolition de la Torture) (FIATCAT), (October 2003). 75 Rene Devisch, precis of talk ("'Pillaging Jesus:' The Response of Healing Churches of Central Africa to Globalization"), Forum for 'Liberation Theology, Annual Report 1997-98. gift exchanges and reciprocity relations that order Zairean society: unable to afford bride price or become breadwinners, young men, for example, abandon pregnant women and fathers go AWOL.76 Simultaneously, the AIDS holocaust leaves behind vast numbers of orphans and HIV-positive children.

I Hate the Internet: A Novel by Jarett Kobek

Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, Blue Ocean Strategy, Burning Man, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, liberation theology, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, packet switching, PageRank, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, V2 rocket, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, wage slave, Whole Earth Catalog

Before she was at Facebook, she was at Google, and Christine decided that Sheryl Sandberg was like Iris, the messenger of the Gods. It seemed like Sheryl Sandberg had spent her whole professional life doing nothing but delivering messages. Like Ray Kurzweil, who Christine identified with Dolos, the Greek spirit of trickery and guile. Ray Kurzweil was the king of technological liberation theology. Or, in other words, he was king of the most intolerable of all intolerable bullshit. He believed in a future where computers would reach a moment of technological singularity. The technological singularity was a bullshit phrase invented by the Science Fiction writer Vernor Vinge. The technological singularity was the name for a theoretical moment in the future when computers would achieve a critical mass of artificial intelligence and wake up and change everything.

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Black Lives Matter, business climate, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate raider, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data science, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, hype cycle, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jim Simons, junk bonds, liberation theology, low skilled workers, machine translation, Michael Milken, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, obamacare, open immigration, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, urban planning, vertical integration

He saw it in governmental organizations such as the European Union and political leaders such as German chancellor Angela Merkel, who insisted that countries forfeit their sovereignty, and thus their ability to maintain their national character, to distant secular bureaucrats bent on erasing national borders. He saw it in the Roman Catholic Church, whose elevation of Pope Francis, “a liberal-theology Jesuit” and “pro-immigration globalist,” to replace Pope Benedict XVI so alarmed him that, in 2013, he established Breitbart Rome and took a Vatican meeting with Cardinal Raymond Burke in an effort to prop up Catholic traditionalists marginalized by the new Pope. More than anywhere else, Bannon saw evidence of Western collapse in the influx of Muslim refugees and migrants across Europe and the United States—what he pungently termed “civilizational jihad personified by this migrant crisis.”

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

In Venezuela, for instance, the state supported the creation of neighbourhood communes as a way to embed socialism in everyday practices.59 On the other hand, resources for new parties can be mobilised collectively – Podemos, for example, got started through crowd-funding €150,000 – and the vitality of the party can be maintained through constant institutionalised negotiations between local movements, party members and central party structures.60 Podemos, for instance, has aimed to build mechanisms for popular governance while also seeking a way into established institutions.61 It is a multi-pronged approach to social change and offers greater potential for real transformation than either option on its own.62 Meanwhile, Brazil’s Partido dos Trabalhadores has maintained openness to multiple groups (liberation theology groups, peasant movements) while still organising around an essentially union-based core. In the words of one researcher, ‘this combination of grassroots and vanguard constituted a Leninism that was not very Leninist’.63 What all these experiences show, however, is the mass mobilisation of the people is necessary in order to transform the state into a meaningful tool of their interests, and to overcome the blunt division between the power of movements and the power of the state.

Who Is Rich? by Matthew Klam

carried interest, dark matter, Dr. Strangelove, liberation theology, Mason jar, mass incarceration, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, TED Talk

I couldn’t stand it, how sure she was. Never reckless. Tried to leave. What better time to be reckless than now? She had all the wrong instincts, took her cues from all the wrong people, from a clergy of predators and an old Nazi pope in a crown. Nothing weird about that, nothing wrong with liberation theology in a banking context in a late-capitalist nightmare in the midst of an environmental meltdown. Arcane legislation written in secret by industry cronies on obscure financial practices and windfalls for carried interest had made her rich. She’d been formed by her parents’ immigrant struggle, a smoldering blue-collar rage, and the last two bull markets.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, Andy Carvin, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, c2.com, Charles Lindbergh, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, hiring and firing, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kuiper Belt, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Merlin Mann, Metcalfe’s law, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Picturephone, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, prediction markets, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler, Yogi Berra

Whether by design or accident, Vatican II, as it came to be called, was more of a feel-good nostrum than an actual recipe for change—it was fine to suggest that the laity somehow constituted the body of the church, but without a mechanism for allowing Catholics to make their feelings known, the practical effect on the hierarchy was minimal. Over the centuries the Catholic Church has been buffeted by incredible institutional pressures, but in all that time every real push for change has come from within the priesthood, from Martin Luther’s 95 Theses in the 1500s to the Liberation Theology of Central and South America in the 1980s. No significant challenge to the hierarchy has ever come directly from the laity—until now. The reaction of the Catholic laity to the abuse scandal is showing us one way in which Vatican II might be implemented, how a collection of individuals previously obstructed from sharing information and opinions across parish lines can have a lasting effect on the church by working together as a group.

A History of Western Philosophy by Aaron Finkel

British Empire, Eratosthenes, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, invention of agriculture, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Plato's cave, plutocrats, source of truth, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the market place, William of Occam

It is derived, no doubt, from love of home and desire for a refuge from danger; we find, accordingly, that it is most passionate in those whose lives are most exposed to catastrophe. Religion seeks permanence in two forms, God and immortality. In God is no variableness neither shadow of turning; the life after death is eternal and unchanging. The cheerfulness of the nineteenth century turned men against these static conceptions, and modern liberal theology believes that there is progress in heaven and evolution in the Godhead. But even in this conception there is something permanent, namely progress itself and its immanent goal. And a dose of disaster is likely to bring men’s hopes back to their older super-terrestrial forms: if life on earth is despaired of, it is only in heaven that peace can be sought.

…

The former is a curious combination of biblical criticism and political theory; the latter deals with political theory only. In biblical criticism Spinoza partially anticipates modern views, particularly in assigning much later dates to various books of the Old Testament than those assigned by tradition. He endeavours throughout to show that the Scriptures can be interpreted so as to be compatible with a liberal theology. Spinoza’s political theory is, in the main, derived from Hobbes, in spite of the enormous temperamental difference between the two men. He holds that in a state of nature there is no right or wrong, for wrong consists in disobeying the law. He holds that the sovereign can do no wrong, and agrees with Hobbes that the Church should be entirely subordinate to the State.

…

After his death, it was again in Western Germany that most of the men of culture were to be found. German philosophy was more connected with Prussia than were German literature and art. Kant was a subject of Frederick the Great; Fichte and Hegel were professors at Berlin. Kant was little influenced by Prussia; indeed he got into trouble with the Prussian Government for his liberal theology. But both Fichte and Hegel were philosophic mouthpieces of Prussia, and did much to prepare the way for the later identification of German patriotism with admiration for Prussia. Their work in this respect was carried on by the great German historians, particularly by Mommsen and Treitschke.

Powers and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, colonial rule, declining real wages, deindustrialization, deskilling, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, language acquisition, liberation theology, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, old-boy network, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, theory of mind, Tobin tax, Turing test

To comprehend his words, it is only necessary to carry out the usual translation from Newspeak to ordinary language. The term ‘stability’ means US control, ‘radicalization’ means unacceptable forms of independence, and ‘fundamentalist religious zealotry’ is a special case of the crime of independence. It is immaterial whether the criminals favour secular nationalism, democratic socialism, fascism, liberation theology or ‘fundamentalist religious zealotry’. Surely Israel’s task is not to undermine the world’s most extreme Islamic fundamentalist regime, Saudi Arabia—at least not right now—just as Israel was not called upon to ‘block’ the extremist Islamic fundamentalist forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the US favourite of the 1980s who has been tearing the remnants of Afghanistan to shreds after the Soviet withdrawal while expanding his narcotrafficking; or the Islamic fundamentalist groups that Israel was nurturing in the occupied territories a few years ago, to undermine the secular PLO.

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Very often, we are offered broad ‘religious’ categories, like Christian (which from time to time is lumped together with Judaism into Judaeo-Christian, and which is regularly divided into Catholic and Protestant), Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and Confucian (this latter category is particularly controversial, because it is not a religion).* Yet think for a minute about these categories.Within the ostensibly homogeneous group ‘Catholic’, we have both the ultra-conservative Opus Dei movement, which has become well-known through Dan Brown’s bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code, and left-wing liberation theology, epitomized in the famous saying by the Brazilian archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Dom Hélder Câmara: ‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.’ These two ‘Catholic’ sub-cultures produce people with very different attitudes towards wealth accumulation, income redistribution and social obligations.

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Very often, we are offered broad ‘religious’ categories, like Christian (which from time to time is lumped together with Judaism into Judaeo-Christian, and which is regularly divided into Catholic and Protestant), Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and Confucian (this latter category is particularly controversial, because it is not a religion).i Yet think for a minute about these categories. Within the ostensibly homogeneous group ‘Catholic’, we have both the ultra-conservative Opus Dei movement, which has become well-known through Dan Brown’s bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code, and left-wing liberation theology, epitomized in the famous saying by the Brazilian archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Dom Hélder Câmara: ‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.’ These two ‘Catholic’ sub-cultures produce people with very different attitudes towards wealth accumulation, income redistribution and social obligations.

Extreme Rambling: Walking Israel's Separation Barrier. For Fun. by Mark Thomas

Boycotts of Israel, Dr. Strangelove, facts on the ground, liberation theology, Ocado, one-state solution, urban planning, urban sprawl

‘This is a new theology,’ continues Nidal. ‘The resistance of love. We declare that the Occupation is a sin against God and humanity and that any theology that justifies the Occupation and its injustices is a heresy.’ I might have left religion a long time ago but the roots run deep, and the ringing bell of liberation theology can still turn my head. With my face visibly lighting up, I say, ‘Is the object to get this into mainstream church thinking?’ ‘Yes, we want to make this a mainstream idea and we want to stop the Bible being used to justify the Occupation and the settlers.’ ‘Are other churches endorsing this idea?’

Uncharted: How to Map the Future by Margaret Heffernan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, clean water, complexity theory, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, driverless car, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, George Santayana, gig economy, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, index card, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, liberation theology, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megaproject, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rosa Parks, Sam Altman, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, University of East Anglia

My teachers were overjoyed, the local priest was thrilled, the bishop was delighted.’ Celibacy hadn’t seemed like a big deal at the time, not compared to the opportunities that would open up for him. In seminary at Maynooth, it had felt like the church was changing, losing its old rigidity, flattening the hierarchy, embracing community and the poor. Liberation theology, a new church for the poor, gave the church a fresh dynamism. As a student, John had been sent to live in a rural village, with instructions to learn everything about the hopes and needs of the people he would serve. Education, homelessness, marriage: as social servant, the church was central to all the issues of the day and John was inspired at Maynooth by the intellectual, social and spiritual challenges he would face.

Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places by Andrew Blackwell

Anthropocene, carbon footprint, clean water, Google Earth, gravity well, liberation theology, nuclear paranoia, off-the-grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, place-making, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the scientific method, young professional

Walking around Santarém with him was like tagging along for a victory lap with a popular former mayor. Acquaintances and friends shouted from windows and sidewalks on every block. We went looking for Father Edilberto Sena not at his church but at the offices of his radio station, which says something about his approach to liberation theology. The station operated from a small, two-story building on a busy street up the hill from the river, and Sena used it to promote his activist causes, beginning with an editorial broadcast every morning. From half a block away, Gil spotted him pulling into a parking spot, and we introduced ourselves on the sidewalk.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

Perhaps they are migrants from rural areas who have lost everything in a flood and thus are desperate for work – any work. But can we really call choices made under such circumstances ‘free’? Aren’t these people acting under compulsion – of having to eat? In this context, we should bear in mind what the Brazilian archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Dom Hélder Câmara, a leading figure of the left-wing Catholic ‘liberation theology’ especially popular in Latin America between the 1950s and the 1970s, said: ‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.’ Perhaps we should all be a bit of a ‘Communist’ and question whether the underlying conditions that make the poor so desperate to voluntarily sign up for ‘bad’ jobs are acceptable.* REAL-LIFE NUMBERS Forced labour The ILO estimates that, as of 2012, around 21 million people in the world are engaged in forced labour.

Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics by Don Hanlon Johnson

BIPOC, clean water, colonial rule, complexity theory, conceptual framework, deep learning, emotional labour, epigenetics, imposter syndrome, liberation theology, mass incarceration, microaggression, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, W. E. B. Du Bois, working poor

Exploring Ignacio Martín-Baró’s conceptualization of liberation psychology, which integrates “psychology’s core aim, the psychological well-being of people with the stark reality of oppressive systems that undermine this aim” has also been important.21 Liberation psychology is rooted in the liberation theology founded by the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, which models a form of politicized somatics where we engage with not only a person’s systems and constellations, but also with the earth. The ultimate goal is to cultivate a deep sense of justice and liberation for all people. The nature of indigenous psychology is to deeply root healing within a sociopolitical and revolutionary context. 21 Taiwo Afuape, Power, Resistance and Liberation in Counseling and Psychotherapy: To Have Our Hearts Broken (London: Routledge, 2011), 59.

Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim Al-Khalili

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Book of Ingenious Devices, colonial rule, Commentariolus, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eratosthenes, Henri Poincaré, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, retrograde motion, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, trade route, William of Occam

He was even critical of some of the ideas of Mu’tazilism itself, as can be found in the opening chapter of his On First Philosophy,7 which he wrote during the reign of al-Mu’tasim. In al-Mutawakkil, we see the first of a line of more conservative caliphs and the beginning of the backlash against the free-thinking and liberal theology of the Mu’tazilite movement. And al-Mutawakkil’s often violent persecution of scholars whose views did not accord with his more fundamentalist version of Islam sees the theological pendulum swinging away from al-Ma’mūn’s mihna to the other extreme; neither ruler endeared himself to those who did not share his views.

City on the Verge by Mark Pendergrast

big-box store, bike sharing, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, desegregation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, food desert, gentrification, global village, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, jitney, land bank, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, power law, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, young professional

It is unfortunate that all of those concerned with the homeless in Atlanta cannot work together.* Winston’s Search for Dignity At the Open Door Community, ordained Presbyterian ministers Ed Loring and Murphy Davis, who are married, have provided free meals, vitamins, clothing, showers, and a passionate, angry kind of liberation theology since 1981. The second time I volunteered there, the Open Door was serving a full turkey dinner with stuffing and soup for lunch. As staff distributed tickets to those waiting outside, I tried to conduct some interviews, but only Winston, a trim black man in his forties, would talk to me. He said he was staying at Peachtree and Pine.

How the World Works by Noam Chomsky, Arthur Naiman, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, capital controls, clean water, corporate governance, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, glass ceiling, heat death of the universe, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land reform, liberation theology, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, single-payer health, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, transfer pricing, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

The Mexican Bishops’ Conference strongly endorsed the position the Latin American bishops took when they met at Santa Domingo [in the Dominican Republic] in December 1992. That meeting in Santa Domingo was the first major conference of Latin American bishops since the ones at Puebla [Mexico] and Medellín [Colombia] back in the 1960s and 1970s. The Vatican tried to control it this time to make sure that they wouldn’t come out with these perverse ideas about liberation theology and the preferential option for the poor. But despite a very firm Vatican hand, the bishops came out quite strongly against neoliberalism and structural adjustment and these free-market-for-the-poor policies. That wasn’t reported here, to my knowledge. There’s been significant union-busting in Mexico.

Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger

Albert Einstein, Charles Lindbergh, disinformation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, liberation theology, Plato's cave, precariat, scientific worldview, side project, traveling salesman, wikimedia commons

A choice remains entangled in myth, while a decision—ideally—breaks away from the supposedly existence-guiding, rational logic of cause and effect, fate and necessity, guilt and reconciliation. This liberation in itself bestows sacredness of a kind. That was the philosophical and educational liberation theory (or liberation theology?) set out by Wittgenstein in the 1920s. But there was one thing that Wittgenstein could not deny, fully aware as he was of having undertaken the leap into a new life as a primary school teacher: the possible meaning of that existence did not appear to him in his daily living of that life.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

But the signs of change are apparent: Brazil has for example seen a huge spike in patent applications over the last decade. Many visits over the years have taught me it would be a mistake to discount the impact of Latin America during the twenty-first century. Perhaps more than anywhere else I think it will surprise us; the continent that gave us everything from magical realism to liberation theology will play a massive role. It's genuinely exciting to think of what new ideas will emerge from this buzzing, unique region. Africa too is changing. Since 2000 six of the top ten fastestgrowing economies have been African. The proportion classed as extremely poor has halved since the 1990s.23 Growth is forecast to continue and the demographic boost is even larger than in India: 600 million will be added to the labour force by 2040.24 Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, will be a crucial part of this.

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

Other forces are needed to spread growth widely, whether it’s cooperatives, unions, progressive taxation, universal provision of basic needs, private charity, or a combination of these and other factors. Social-enterprise hype glorifies market mechanisms and therefore crowds out important approaches that come with few extrinsic rewards. We need more of what liberation theology calls a “preferential option for the poor” (Farmer 2005, p. 139). 36.Franzen (2010), p. 439. 37.Fisher (2012). 38.McNeil (2010). 39.UNESCO (2012). That still leaves over 50 million children out of school, though. 40.International Committee of the Red Cross (2014). 41.Richard Davidson is a leader in the field of affective neuroscience, which seeks out the physiological underpinnings of emotion.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

People are often surprised by that. . . . And I always try to explain to people that people actually came to Google not to get wealthy, but to change the world. And I genuinely believe that.” Another way to believe our plutocrats are heroes battling for the collective good is to think of capitalism as a liberation theology—free markets equal free people, as the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal asserts. One of the most convincing settings for this vision is Moscow, where in October 2010 you could hear it ringingly delivered by Pitch Johnson, one of the founders of the venture capital business in Silicon Valley, in a public lecture to business school students about capitalism and innovation.

The Laundromat : Inside the Panama Papers, Illicit Money Networks, and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, central bank independence, Charlie Hebdo massacre, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, high net worth, income inequality, independent contractor, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

There had been a priest in almost every generation of the Mora family going back centuries.12 Fonseca dropped out of university after a year, attracted by the reformist zeal of the Jesuits. The priests were secretly running workshops where university students could connect with other members of civil society interested in social reform. Through the Jesuits, Fonseca met Father Héctor Gallego, a charismatic thirty-year-old Catholic cleric from Colombia. Gallego practiced liberation theology, which taught that the Church’s responsibility to the poor included helping them to improve their economic and political situation. Gallego worked in an isolated rural parish called Santa Fé in the Panamanian province of Veraguas. Today, it can be reached from Panama City by road in about four and half hours.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

In 1765 Blackstone still takes it as obvious that “distinction of ranks and honors is necessary in every well-governed state,” a sentiment one can still find among conservatives.14 The Levellers had secular predecessors, such as Wat Tyler, John Ball, and Jack Straw in 1381, or the Ciompi revolt of the wool carders in Florence in 1378, or for that matter Spartacus or the emigrating Jews under Moses, as Marxian scholars such as the historical sociologist Mielants note.15 But Mielants is forgetting, as secular scholars tend to, the persistent egalitarian radicalism of the Church of Faith, as against the Church of Power, from the Desert Fathers of the third century down to the Liberation Theology of the twentieth.16 The Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498) brought the Florence of 1494 to radical democracy (in his case combined with conservative Christianity, a formula repeated among many Radical Reformers, such as the Anabaptists), which would terrify European elites for centuries—despicable “mob rule,” they called it, until it became a universal political ideal.17 * Yet such a tale of People in Revolt misses something happening among the elite too, a shift in ideas of what made for nobility.

…

The historical sociologist Jack Goldstone, following Jacob, argues that “only in England was the new science actively preached from the pulpit (where Anglican ministers found the orderly, law-ordained universe of Newton both a model for the order they wished for their country and a convenient club with which to beat the benighted Catholic Church), sponsored in the Royal Society, and spread through popular demonstrations of mechanical devices for craftsmen and industrialists.”20 In Spain and Italy most of the clergy, as against a tiny group of their philosophers, held back their praise for a natural life in trade. Among the Roman Catholics the eudaimonism favorable to trade-tested betterment was regularly overcome by a strictly hierarchical church governance. Notoriously the Church of Power, with few exceptions such as Liberation Theology, has sided with the government of the day, as spectacularly in French history—in contrast with the struggle against governments in the Radical Reformation. The governments did not want creative destruction if the destruction had any chance of disturbing their powers. And so Christ stopped at Eboli, and did not continue to Lucania.

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

air freight, banking crisis, big-box store, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, dematerialisation, employer provided health coverage, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, Firefox, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, liberation theology, McMansion, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Wall-E, Whole Earth Review, Zipcar

(Bhagavad Gita, II.71) Khalil Gibran: “The lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.” (The Prophet) Islamic: “The best kind of wealth is to give up inordinate desires.” (Imam Ali A.S.) Jewish: “Give me neither poverty nor riches.” (Proverbs 30:8) Liberation Theology: “The poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.” (Gustavo Gutiérrez) Native American: “Miserable as we seem in thy eyes, we consider ourselves... much happier than thou, in this that we are very content with the little that we have.”

Killing Hope: Us Military and Cia Interventions Since World War 2 by William Blum

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, kremlinology, land reform, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, nuremberg principles, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, trickle-down economics, union organizing

Church people working for the CIA in the Third World have typically been involved in gathering information about the activities and attitudes of individual peasants and workers, spotting the troublemakers, recruiting likely agents, preaching the gospel of anti-communism, acting as funding conduits, and serving as a religious "cover" for various Agency operations. An extreme anti-communist, Vekemans was a front-line soldier in the struggle of the Christian Democrats and the Catholic Church against the "liberation theology" then gaining momentum amongst the mote liberal clergy in Latin America and which would lead to the historic dialogue between Christianity and Marxism.17 The operation worked. It worked beyond expectations. Frei received 56 percent of the vote to Allende's 39 percent. The CIA regarded "the anti-communist scare campaign as the most effective activity undertaken", noted the Senate committee.18 This was the tactic directed toward Chilean women in particular.

Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott

addicted to oil, agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, company town, cotton gin, death from overwork, flex fuel, Ford Model T, land tenure, liberation theology, Mason jar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working poor

In 1552, in his sixties, Las Casas produced his sensational Brevísima Relación de la Destrución de las Indias (Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indians), his heartbreakingly personal witness to the annihilation of the natives, fifteen million of them by his count. He also wrote powerful books about the Incas of Peru and, until he died at age eighty-two, worked on his Historia de las Indias. He defied the Spanish Inquisition, publishing some books without its permission. Las Casas preached what can only be regarded as sixteenth-century liberation theology, which considers activism in the cause of human rights and social justice integral to Christian faith. For Las Casas, human rights were indistinguishable from practical, lived Christianity. Notre Dame law professor Paolo Carrozza has described Las Casas as “the midwife of modern human rights talk.”39 Las Casas also introduced the principle of restitution for human rights violations.

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, David Graeber, Defenestration of Prague, deskilling, disinformation, emotional labour, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global village, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, land tenure, late capitalism, liberation theology, means of production, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-Fordism, post-work, private military company, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Richard Stallman, Slavoj Žižek, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

Étienne Gilson (Paris: Vrin, 1930). 72 On the “power of the flesh” in the Pauline tradition, see Henry de Lubac, Catholicisme: Les aspects sociaux du dogme (Paris: Le Cerf, 1941). This book, relying on Patristic and Augustinian foundations, opened up the way for a historical conception of redemption, a tradition that the contemporary forms of “liberation theology” have greatly developed. 73 The concept of the political body served to reinforce theories of the absolutist state in early modern Europe, but the analogy continued throughout modernity. On the conception of the political body as a united living organism in classical German philosophy, from Kant and Fichte to Hegel and Marx, see Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 74 We will discuss these arguments more fully at the beginning of chapter 3.

Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity by Francis Fukuyama

Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, double entry bookkeeping, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mittelstand, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transfer pricing, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois

See in particular his discussion of Amintore Fanfani’s critique of capitalism, published in 1935. 15Novak (1993), pp. 115-143, points in particular to Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Centesimus Annus as marking a break with earlier Vatican positions on capitalism. 16These included Spain, Portugal, virtually all countries in Latin America, as well as Hungary, Poland, and Lithuania. See Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave (Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), pp. 74-85. 17Among the places where the fit is less than perfect is the tradition of liberation theology in Latin America, which is overtly hostile to capitalism and often ambivalent about liberal democracy. 18James Q. Wilson has documented at length that this moral side has a natural basis that is evident even in infants and young children who have not yet been “socialized.” See Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1993), pp. 121-140.

The end of history and the last man by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, centre right, classic study, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, life extension, linear programming, long peace, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nuclear winter, old-boy network, open economy, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

., The Protestant Ethic and Modernization: A Comparative View (New York: Basic Books, 1968), pp. 184-208; Lawrence E. Harrison’s book on the impact of culture on progress, forthcoming from Basic Books in 1992; and David Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). Contemporary “Liberation Theology” in Latin America is a worthy heir to the Counterreformation insofar as it has served to de-legitimize rational, unlimited capitalist accumulation. 11 Weber himself wrote books on the religions of China and India to explain why the spirit of capitalism did not arise in those cultures. This is a slightly different point from the question of why these cultures encouraged or inhibited capitalism imported from the outside.

Lonely Planet Nicaragua (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Alex Egerton, Greg Benchwick

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Day of the Dead, land reform, liberation theology, Multics, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, traveling salesman

Most Nicaraguan TV stations have two types of news: a sensationalist ambulance-chasing edition featuring graphic portrayals of fights and accidents – usually displayed on the big screen at dinner time – followed by a far less popular political edition. Religion Although Nicaragua’s majority religion is Catholic (about 59% of the population identifies as such), Nicaraguan Catholicism retains many indigenous elements, as the decor and ceremonies of churches such as San Juan Bautista de Subtiava and Masaya’s María Magdelena make clear. Liberation theology also made its mark on Nicaraguan Catholicism, influencing priest and poet Ernesto Cardenal to advocate armed resistance to the Somoza dictatorship. Publicly chastised and later defrocked by Pope John Paul II, Cardenal remains a beloved religious leader. Nicaragua’s incredible selection of Catholic churches and fascinating fiestas patronales remain highlights of the country.

Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa by Martin Meredith

back-to-the-land, banking crisis, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, Great Leap Forward, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, liberation theology, Nelson Mandela, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route

Kruger himself played a leading role in breaking away from the Transvaal’s main church, the Nederduits Hervormde Kerk, to establish the Dopper Church. Together with a few like-minded colleagues, he recruited a new minister from the Christelike Afgescheiden Gerformeerde Kerk in Holland, a splinter group which had seceded from the state church in 1834, rejecting its liberal theology and its evangelical emphasis on personal devotion and experience. Shortly after the minister’s arrival in the Transvaal in 1858, Kruger joined other dissidents in denouncing the Nederduits Hervormde Kerk as a ‘deluded’ and ‘false’ church and left. The core of Dopper theology, based almost exclusively on the Old Testament, was the Calvinist conception of the sovereignty of God in every aspect of life and acceptance of the Bible as the only source of belief and practice.

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cakes and ale, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cryptocurrency, dark matter, decarbonisation, degrowth, distributed ledger, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, fiat currency, Food sovereignty, full employment, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, High speed trading, high-speed rail, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, land reform, liberation theology, liquidity trap, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, megastructure, Modern Monetary Theory, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rewilding, RFID, Robert Solow, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, synthetic biology, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, wage slave, Washington Consensus

Just had to give up and go to bed; we were going to have to deal with a lot of shit the next day. And there was no point in drinking any more. It wasn’t going to do any good. Our leader had made a simple but deadly mistake. The world would go on, but for us it would never be the same. 58 The usual view of liberation theology locates it in South America in the latter part of the twentieth century. The phrase was invented to describe this Latin American phenomenon, so it’s fair enough to think that’s what it refers to. But in Spain we think there was an earlier example of a young idealistic Catholic priest, helping his people in defiance of the church hierarchy.

Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, gentrification, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, Howard Zinn, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Samuelson, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, wage slave, women in the workforce

At that point, the only question for people who know anything about American history should have been, “how are they going to get rid of this guy?”—because something like the Aristide victory simply is not tolerable in our sphere: a populist movement based on grassroots support, and a priest infected with liberation theology? That won’t last. And of course, the U.S. instantly started to undermine the Aristide government: investment and aid were cut off, except to the Haitian business community so it could start forming counter-Aristide forces; the National Endowment for Democracy went in to try to set up counter-institutions to subvert the new government, which by an odd accident are exactly the institutions that survived intact after the 1991 coup, though nobody here happened to notice that little coincidence; and so on. 51 But nevertheless, despite all this, within a couple months of the election the Aristide regime was in fact proving itself to be very successful—which of course made it even more dangerous from the perspective of U.S. power.

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw

airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, centre right, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, labour market flexibility, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, post-war consensus, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, young professional

They reinvigorated debate within the Church, among the laity as well as clergy, stirred enthusiasm among the faithful for new forms of participation in pastoral work, and widened horizons to greater awareness of social deprivation outside Europe, notably in Latin America. But the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch rightly described the outcome of the Council as only ‘half a revolution’. Pandora’s box had been opened, but the bishops were soon trying to push down the lid again. Moves to link the Church to political radicalism and to Latin American ‘liberation theology’ were blocked. Lay participation was welcomed, as long as the clergy retained firm control. The ‘college’ of bishops amounted to little more than verbiage as papal primacy was reaffirmed. And the Swiss theologian, Hans Küng (who had participated as an advisor in the Vatican Council), was eventually barred from teaching Catholic theology – he was a professor in Tübingen in West Germany – after publicly rejecting the doctrine of papal infallibility.

A History of Judaism by Martin Goodman

British Empire, classic study, deep learning, liberation theology, mass immigration, place-making, spice trade, the market place, trade route, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War

At the heart of both movements was a desire to emphasize the rational aspects of Judaism and Jewish history so that the Jews might see themselves as like other Europeans. Many in the Hamburg congregation had been brought up in homes in which Jewish practices were not much observed, and the search for a rational Judaism paralleled the contemporary adoption of Protestant Christians, in an atmosphere of religious revival particularly in Germany, of a meaningful liberal theology based on biblical criticism. Both historians and theologians did their best to minimize the mystical traditions of the kabbalah, denigrating or ignoring such practices as unworthy of the lofty religious ideals of an enlightened nation. But in countries independent of the Reform movement in Germany historical scholarship and philosophical speculation sometimes led Jews to somewhat different religious stances.

A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book by John Barton

classic study, complexity theory, feminist movement, invention of the printing press, Johannes Kepler, lateral thinking, liberation theology, Republic of Letters, source of truth, the market place, trade route

This kind of criticism soon stopped being ‘aesthetic’, in the sense of admiring the beauty of the biblical text, and began to be interested in how the text subverts both ancient and modern culture, challenges colonial power and embraces and empowers non-elite groups.54 Here it joins again with theological interests, such as the concerns of liberation theology, which pays attention to how the text can enable oppressed groups to express their longing for freedom. At the moment there is a flourishing industry of post-critical biblical study, informed by political, social-scientific and postmodernist insights, which leaves behind the older critical concerns with the dates and the literary development of texts, in order to pursue an agenda defined by what is often called simply Theory.55 Like the canonical approach, but with quite different concerns, this focuses on the text as we have it, and is more or less indifferent to what lies beneath the surface.

Arabs: A 3,000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, invention of movable type, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, New Urbanism, out of africa, Pax Mongolica, plutocrats, post-truth, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

They will see, for example: … the search for freedom and independence of those original diverse pioneers who left the northern fertile crescent for the wild south of the peninsula – the likely first ’arab; … the settled, productive, non-tribal pre-Islamic societies of that other fertile crescent in South Arabia; … the cosmopolitan networks of trade and culture that centred on great caravan cities like Palmyra, Qaryat and Mecca, meeting-places of badw and hadar; … the eloquent individualism of the pre-Islamic ‘vagabond’ poets like al-Shanfara, seekers and speakers of truth beyond tribal boundaries; … the all-embracing heaven of the earlier Qur’anic revelations – Those who believe and those who are Jews and Christians and Sabians [a gnostic sect in Mesopotamia], whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day and acts righteously, they shall have their reward with their Lord; … the inclusiveness of Muhammad’s first Constitution of Medina, and of his Farewell Sermon, the crystallization of his mission; … the brief but marvellous openness of Abbasid society at its height, particularly under the philosopher-caliph, al-Ma’mun (before he became infallible); … the ‘cultured, sophisticated, broad-minded’ contemporary caliphate of Cordova, where life was ‘something glorious in itself, to be ennobled by learning and enlivened by every kind of pleasure’; … the liberating theologies of Sufism; … the adaptability and spiritual depth of Islam in the expansive, oceanic fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and after; … the intellectual, intercredal movers of the nineteenth-century Awakening; … the twentieth-century advocates of cultural collaboration, like Taha Husayn, married to Europe as he was; … the truth-seeking poets of the exodus in our own times, spiritual descendants of the ‘vagabonds’; … the seekers of liberty, dignity and daily bread now and to come.

I You We Them by Dan Gretton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, Desert Island Discs, drone strike, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Honoré de Balzac, IBM and the Holocaust, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, pre–internet, restrictive zoning, Stanford prison experiment, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

He had a curious way of tapping the cigarette gently on the packet three times before lighting it, and then he said, ‘Well, I might just do that. After all, I’ll have the time now.’ Within a year he was dead. But his qualities and beliefs live on in my mind. He was highly reflective, vigorously intellectual, a left-wing Catholic who admired liberation theology greatly. And as a father a gentle inspiration, loving, funny, wise. A dream of a father. He never quite understood my obsession with football as a boy, but in the summer we’d play cricket, which was more his game, and he’d teach me how to spin the ball. Inevitably, when I hit adolescence, we had our clashes, but nothing different from most sons and fathers.

Central America by Carolyn McCarthy, Greg Benchwick, Joshua Samuel Brown, Alex Egerton, Matthew Firestone, Kevin Raub, Tom Spurling, Lucas Vidgen

airport security, Bartolomé de las Casas, California gold rush, call centre, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, digital map, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, land reform, liberation theology, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

ARCHIPIÉLAGO DE SOLENTINAME Isolated Archipiélago de Solentiname (Solentiname Archipelago), in the southern part of Lago de Nicaragua, is a traditional haven for artists and a fascinating place to visit. Ernesto Cardenal, the versatile artist-poet-monk who was minister of culture during the Sandinista years, set up a communal society here for craftspeople, poets and painters, inspired by the principles of liberation theology. A distinctive school of colorful primitivist painting arose out of these revolutionary-era workshops and has become world-famous. Solentiname comprises 36 islands; the largest are Mancarrón, San Fernando (also called Isla Elvis Chavarría) and Venada (Isla Donald Guevara). The first two have the principal facilities for travelers.

Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

John Paul II (Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, elected 1978) added immense charm and energy to the agenda. Actor, linguist, and globetrotter extraordinary, he took the Papacy to the world. In May 1981, in St Peter’s Square, he survived an assassination attempt by a Turkish terrorist, possibly hired by the KGB. Implacably hostile to ‘liberation theology’, birth control, and clerical indiscipline, he was in some respects a fierce traditionalist. His suspension of the Swiss theologian Professor Hans Küng (b. 1928), who had questioned the dogma of papal infallibility, worried many Catholic intellectuals; and his assertion of the Church’s teaching on moral philosophy, as summarized in Veritatis Splendor (1993)Ú offended the ‘relativists’ in the field.