ON THE ROLE OF A TRANSCENDENT IN HUMAN ECONOMY: TOWARD A NEW SYNTHESIS Available to Purchase

Introduction We would like to make it clear at the outset that the present essay is not an essay in theology. Theology deals with the articulation of some symbol of the Ultimate or All, i.e. some “Theos”, or God. Rather, our concern is with humans and their perceptions and experiences of some Ultimate or All; this concern is typical of a religious studies approach. The approach of contemporary religious studies is much like the social scientific, only much more self‐conscious of the implicit cultural presuppositions and deductive principles that control its mode of producing facts from data. The social sciences usually treat data and facts as though they were one and the same. We use the religious studies approach in order to discern and assess the implications, consequences and/or impact of religion and its central symbols on human beings. In this essay our focus will not be simply on human beings, but on their ideologies and the behaviors flowing from those ideologies in the arbitrarily delineated sphere of the social called “economy”.