Jennifer A. Quigley— People today don’t usually think of going to the bank, buying groceries, and signing a lease as religious acts, but in the ancient world, they very often were. While many people today tend to think of religion and the economy as distinct, in the ancient Greco-Roman world,
Kathryn Tanner— The Protestant ethic was the spirit of industrial capitalism in its Fordist varieties, where investments sunk in expensive equipment dedicated to the production of one thing meant mass production and mass consumption. That Protestant ethic was composed of a set of values in which hard work was a
Brandon Ruud— The catalogue for the exhibition Americans in Spain: Painting and Travel, 1820–1920 was a labor of love, a treat to produce, and, especially, a visual feast thanks to the number of objects and the generosity of so many lenders willing to include some of their greatest masterpieces. The book’s
Sarah Koenig— On a hill in Southeast Washington, a 26-foot, 11-inch white marble obelisk inscribed with the word “Whitman” stands in striking relief against the Blue Mountains in the distance. The monument marks the mass grave of Protestant missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, along with eleven other white Americans who
Donna Hicks— If there were ever a time when leaders needed to understand the role dignity plays in the workplace, that time is now. The pandemic forced us to work from home, disrupting our traditional notion of what work looks like: where to work, how to work, and when to work.
Ashley L. Cohen— On a winter evening a man sits by his fireside, waiting for the serene quiet of his country retirement to be interrupted by the delivery of a London newspaper. So opens “The Winter Evening,” Book 4 of William Cowper’s long poem, The Task (1785). The set piece is, without
W.M. Adams and K.H. Redford— On Gough Island, a steep speck of land deep in the South Atlantic, giant mice eat albatross chicks as they sit on their nests. They are house mice, accidental arrivals on the ships of long-dead sealers. But they have lost their secretive, timid, mousy ways.
Eric Herschthal— It does not take much effort to find evidence of the ways science, medicine, and technology contribute to systemic racism. The Covid pandemic exposed how lack of access to quality medical care, coupled with the prevalence of Black people in low-paying front-line jobs, contributed to the pandemic’s disparate
Alison B. Powell— The smart city isn’t new. For at least the past two decades, new communication technologies have been imagined, marketed, and constructed to improve the function and experience of urban life. Let’s revisit the smart city of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when access to internet technologies
Zander Brietzke— On January 1, 1935 Eugene O’Neill outlined a series of four plays about four brothers (a ship captain, a gambler, a politician, and a railroad magnate) set in the second half of the nineteenth century. O’Neill called this group his Cycle because each play was to circulate the