By: Mike on February 7, 2018
Vincent Miller’s Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture makes bold comparisons between religion as a commodity and religious people as the consumer. His narrative is framed for readers within the postmodern American society that has historically supported the paradigm that the US is a nation of consumers and a nation of…
By: Kyle Chalko on February 2, 2018
The Great Transformation by Karl Polyani is a landmark book describing the world’s transition that coincided with and was sparked because of the industrial revolution. Polyani proposed a few major ways that this revolution shifted the dynamic of the entire world experience. Primarily the industrial revolution changed the way the world (both government and people)…
By: Trisha Welstad on February 2, 2018
Karl Polanyi’s work in The Great Transformation gave me pause on multiple occasions. I am not an economist and I have not studied the history of the Industrial Revolution in any depth as to readily consider the effects of the market economy on modern society especially as pertains to leadership and the church. Yet, Polanyi’s…
By: Kristin Hamilton on February 1, 2018
“Many evangelicals themselves have little understanding of their own historical roots and little appreciation of the movement’s diversity across many cultures and nations.” – Lewis & Pierard[1] “History is but a fable agreed upon.” – Napoleon Bonaparte “For most of history, anonymous was a woman.” – Virginia Woolf I love history. In particular, I love…
By: Chip Stapleton on February 1, 2018
One of the most important and transformative experiences for me in my study to become a minister was (of all things) my seminary class on Church History. The class was so important and such a defining experience for me was because it was, intentionally, designed to be very different than the church history courses that…
By: Stu Cocanougher on February 1, 2018
This summer I will be leading a mission trip to East Asia. This team will consist of about 50 persons, mostly adults, but some children and teens will join their parents. We just purchased our airplane tickets for the trip today. Since there is a direct flight from DFW, our team will board a…
By: Jason Turbeville on February 1, 2018
I have always been a proponent of a free market system. I came of age in the era of capitalism and the last twenty years of the cold war. I grew up in an upper middle class home. The son of a Neonatologist and a mother with a Ph.D. in counseling. We never lacked for…
By: Mark Petersen on February 1, 2018
In reading The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi, I paused frequently, reflecting that this man seems to be a prophet ahead of his time. His seminal work outlines the history of the liberal self-regulating market, now a globalized phenomenon and is an inescapable structure within societies. Written in the latter years of World War II,…
By: Jean Ollis on February 1, 2018
In 47 years of life, I’ve never experienced the United States as politically polarized as it is today. To be honest, I was not alive – or too young to remember and not personally affected by – The Great Depression, Richard Nixon scandal or Vietnam War polarization. However, economics and globalization have always fascinated and…
By: Lynda Gittens on February 1, 2018
In the late 70’s earlier 80’s, my church planted and sustained an orphanage in Haiti until the government coup took the orphanage from us. Around 2007, our church began to plant mission trips and partnership with other nonprofits located in South Africa but halted the impact of the mission visits because of the need to…
By: Christal Jenkins Tanks on February 1, 2018
“There is no doubt that the primary source material is at least partially responsible for the adoption of this more limited lens. Much of the material upon which we depend as historians is written from the male perspective and more often than not from the vantage point of the pulpit rather than the pew”[1] This…
By: Dave Watermulder on February 1, 2018
On April 15, 2000, I was standing on the corner of 20th and I Streets in Washington DC. Like many other college students that weekend, I had come out to see what the fuss was all about. All around me, there were thousands of protesters on the street, demonstrating against the International Monetary Fund and…
By: Jay Forseth on February 1, 2018
Is it against Portland Seminary academic standards to mainly use Scripture to discuss the economic ideas by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time? Please forgive me if it is! My worldview is unabashedly Christian, so the framework I attempt to begin every thought with is the Bible. I will…
By: Chris Pritchett on February 1, 2018
The main thesis of Polanyi’s seminal work on the transformation of societies from traditional to market economies is that the “Industrial Revolution was merely the beginning of a revolution” that marked the end of an era that seemed to protect human dignity and relationships in a way that Polanyi assumed would be lost in the…
By: Shawn Hart on February 1, 2018
“Polanyi created a way of thinking about economies and societies that has had substantial impact on economic history, anthropology, and the study of the ancient Mediterranean. The Great Transformation remains important as a highly original contribution to the understanding of the Western past; it has been and is important in methodological debates in the social sciences.”[1] This…
By: Katy Drage Lines on February 1, 2018
As I read through these essays curated by Donald Lewis and Richard Pierard, I grappled with mixed feelings. Each of the ten essays approached the topic of evangelicalism in their context differently. In following the work of a dozen authors, I offer some reflections, though primarily focusing on the late Ogbu Kalu’s essay on Africa,…
By: Jennifer Williamson on February 1, 2018
As a missionary, I manufacture nothing, sell nothing, purchase next to nothing, and employ no one. My biggest contribution to the global economy is the spending of my monthly income (which fluctuates based on the exchange rate) on commodities such as rent, groceries, and my son’s college tuitions. I’m not an economist, and I don’t…
By: Greg on February 1, 2018
“In China, doing business is hard; living a Christian life is harder; doing business while maintaining Christian faith is the hardest of all.”[1] For several thousands of years, the Chinese feudal system has taught its citizens to despise business people; seeing them as distrustful. In recent decades, there have been campaigns for greater financial and…
By: Mike on February 1, 2018
Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, first published in 1944, was an evolutionary roadmap for economic sociology. Polanyi’s predictive inquiry asks how society responds to phenomenon’s such as globalization and market failure.[1] Known today as the originator of substantivism, a cultural approach to economics, Polanyi’s visionary narrative leaves behind a legacy that continues to influence economists…
By: Jake Dean-Hill on January 31, 2018
The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time by Karl Polanyi was an educational and interesting read. Polanyi’s dissection of market economy and the connection he made to social relationships and the role human beings play in society was especially of interest to me. Polanyi states, “Our thesis is that the idea…
