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When I think back on the semester it is easy to get lost in the moments, the laughter and the pain. I had many options upon which to write this padlet and although I could totally follow the rubric, my grade can afford for me to sway slightly. I want to tell you a story, of what it is like to be a college girl with too much on her plate just trying to live to see another day. I'm an RA and to some that just means I complete room checks and do busy work for my RD. But in reality it means that I am a representative of the university, and one of the hardest parts of this job is how emotionally straining it can be. There have been days where I skipped class to emotionally process the toll of being an objective mediator in situations where people were choosing to cause each other pain. I have failed tests because the night before I watched a woman fall and break her hip and was one of the only witnesses and as an RA I was trained to step in and help delegate and control the situation. I have spent nights crying because although I was on duty in Clamp lobby and needed to do rounds I had so much work to do and we are not allowed to put on headphones but there were movie marathons going on around me. I have to hold myself to a higher standard because despite the many hats I wear the role of RA is the one most exclusively associated with Anderson University.

I am also a barista at Books & Beans on campus where I work 20 hours a week and as much as that job is about preparing drinks it is also about customer service. I was the first person this year to ever get a complaint against them for a situation I did not know how to respond to. I have been late to almost every single morning shift because in order for me to almost keep As & Bs in my class I have to stay up way too late just to wake up early and get to work around 7 am. My coworkers look up to me because at the beginning of the year I was one of 5 returners out of the 9-11 employees. I did not have the time to train people but I did it because that is what was required of me and the only way the shop could function at the beginning of the year. Despite how busy Books & Beans is it has always been a comforting place. I guess I am so used to living in chaos that I have learned to create order in the middle of the rush to the point where I can do an hour long rush with only one drink cued at all times. But it is still another place in which people have set expectations for me to meet as an example to the new people, for putting away orders and for implementing company policies.

I am also an honors tutor and as scared as I was to have to academically guide and council the freshmen honors class it has proven to be one of the most rewarding and fulfilling experiences of my life. Although in the beginning there was tension due to the intensity in which I prepared information and the students lack of confidence in their own academic abilities that all changed when they were assigned their paper. I had the unique opportunity to meet with these students one on one multiple times and literally pick their brains about what they found important in history and althought their paper was focused on Constantine, I also was able to catch a glimpse at the way in which they interpret the gospel mission and the secularization of the church. I had conversations with some of them until 4 in the morning for the sake of building community and the opportunity to grow as people. They are some of the most authentic and humble humans I have ever met. I cannot wait to see what they do with their talents and passions.

I am also a sister and a daughter in a very disfunctional and broken family. I am a twin and the second-youngest of five. Right before the semester began my older sister married a guy in a courtroom without telling my siblings and if that does not define the lack of communication in my family then nothing does. I wish this was the most controversial thing that happened but our family group chat has brought me to tears in frustrations as people fight over Christmas plans, calling each other for birthdays, and lack of scheduling. We have not all been in the same room in almost three years. But who am I, if not the product of my parents and my family? I am a 19 year old girl with a tattoo and no permit nor license. My only valid identification form is my passport and when people ask me where home is I have to calculate which answer will satisfy them the most. My parents moved to Connecticut the day after I graduated but I know the backroads of the town where I graduated better than I can trace the veins on my arms. Yet my dorm room is still just as foreign as the place my parents live, so when people ask me where I go home to I have to resist telling them that I am my home and the place where I rest my head does not always bring me comfort but it does bring me rest and isn't that the point of going home? To find comfort and familiarity and right now I only find it in myself, and even then sometimes my own skin is not inviting. I have been on my own since I was 17, just trying to survive to the next day and some days I have not known where my next meal will come from or where I will rest my head that night but God has still provided.

Yet despite the many hats I wear I am still a student and my professors have high expectations for me because I am in the honors college. Within the honors college my peers have expectations of me because I have very strong convictions and am rather vocal about them but that is in no way my goal I have just learned that although I do not have the grounding to stand for something important I can still stand up for myself. So no I do not know what I want to do with my life or where I will be in five years but I know what I believe. I know that God is real and I know that no matter how much is on my plate, the pressure from my parents to succeed will always carry the most weight. But I have a Father in heaven who cares more for me than they ever did. Some days I just wish I could just be a student. That I wasn't an RA, barista, tutor, daughter, or sister. Some days I wish I wasn't so alone, but that day has not arrived yet. So for now, I will stand for myself when I am all I have supporting me. I will wear these many hats even when I am growing weary and just want to lay my head down to rest.

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What does it mean to be a Christian? Does that word imply following Christ, recognizing his authority, believing in his place in human history? What are the requirements for the faith? Is our personal apologetic and theological views the ones through which we dictate and define a "Christian" saying that if someone else believes something contrary to our beliefs or sins differently than we do that "they do not believe in my God". According to Wikipedia, "A christian is a person who follows or adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ." This is one of the most objective definitions of Christian free from bias towards or against a certain doctrine. How much of what we believe and hold to be true is based in the teachings of prominent preachers and biblical scholars? This definition most likely will appear to broad for many because they believe that some of the denominations outlined on The Christian Family Tree below are heresy. Well what defines heresy? If heresy is something that contradicts religious doctrine than how can we define any denomination as being true? If doctrine is by definition dependent on the beliefs of an individual church or group, is it not relative? All this to say only God knows who is saved because even those who claim to follow him, go to church every Sunday, and serve him daily can still have false beliefs. Is a false belief or interpretation of scripture worthy of damnation or grace?

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Week 12 - Call it Postmodernism (based on the comic)

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Week 12 - Call it Postmodernism (based on the comic)

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This is my problem with the current direction in which English education is going. We are trying to find meaning for everything and if an author does something we do not understand it is because they are thinking more complexly than we are. This was my issue with our CS Lewis discussion, people are unwilling to admit when an author makes a mistake, especially if they are well-known and well-liked by the general public. Sometimes the messages in a text do not make sense this does not mean that they are to be more glorified for their heightened level of approach to literature. No one is above reproach so stop treating imperfect people like they are perfect and defending errors because you look up to someone. Everyone makes mistakes, some of them are just more public than others.

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There is a common misconception among Christians in the bible belt that people are only atheists because they had some crisis of Faith and it turned them away. Hick's argues that "Postmodernism is a symptom of the far Left's crisis of faith." The problem with this claim is that it assumes that at some point everyone believes in something, the church often likes to say that it takes more faith to be an atheist than it does to believe in God. I think it's very easy for Christians to lack a sense of understanding for atheism and blanket it with a disconnect from God. Some people are just raised unaware of God that does not mean they have experienced a faith crisis it just means they do not have the faith that characterizes Christianity. A lack of faith is not the same as a loss of faith.

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Oh CS Lewis, how you disappointed me. So, for those of you who may read this without true context of the Tao. The Tao is the basis of Taoism, which is known for the YinYang symbol. CS Lewis used the Tao as the symbol upon which he based all morality and common human law, yet this is the symbol of an eastern religion. This cartoon is one of many depitcing Christ as the embodiment of the Tao, there are even books written about this. In class we discussed the basis of arguments and how he claims that to exist outside of the Tao is to be unable to argue against the Tao because the Tao is the basis of the conversation. I completely disagreed because the Tao is a lens through which to view a conversation based on a different common ground. Another issue I had with our discussion in class is that the basis of a debate or intellectual conversation is not a common goal it is a common characteristic. To say that language or a concept is the basis of a discussion is too general of a topic. The true link for any conversation is the fact that you are human and that is not to say that the Tao, which supposedly governs all common human law, is in control and the basis of an argument. Instead, the claim is that being human is your common ground across language barriers and different stages of life. We can relate based on that, now for more intellectual conversations we do advance in the complexicity of the basis of correlation to language first then context and topic but the basis of all arguments is that realization that all humans are humans making them flawed imperfect beings with a different perspective that may or may not be justified but either way exists.

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This is a visual representation of the issue with education, we no longer take a reading and apply its lessons to our lives instead we take passages and extrapolate unintended meanings from shallow word choices to describe the author's purpose or the characters at play. This cartoon portraya the issue with the way in which we interpret information, we take correlations and give them meaning and causality that they do not have in order to give a shallow comment depth.

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As a government conspiracy theorist and dystopic novel fanatic, 1984 is one of my favorite books. The use of language to portray a political agenda throughout this book is eloquent and brilliant. It shows the truth strength of language when used for power rather than just for persuasion. These slogans of Big Brother were used to influence the people into changing the way they interpreted information. Newspeak redefined the meaning of words as to support a political agenda and made it so that what was true is what was acceptable, to think outside of the accepted means was to cease to have reason and to be in need of political correction.

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This is the problem with trying to learn new material after a discussion on postmodernism. You have to acknowledge the meaning of words themselves and how the words in a definition are used. This often comes up in honors discussion, starting in the first semester because until a word is denotared we use our connotations of a word to influence how we use it. Once the class has settled on a denotation discussions become easier to navigate because we are all arguing on an even, defined playing field.

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Week 6 - Circular Reasoning or Postmodernism?

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Week 6 - Circular Reasoning or Postmodernism?

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In class this week we discussed the paradoxical nature of postmodernism as both a flaw and a justification based on differing perspectives. The problem that I see with this perception of truth as relative lies in intention and ownership of ones actions. Is the truth not the intent of the person committing an action or a third party's interpretation of an event? There has recently been this move in literature where readers extrapolate intended meanings from the diction and syntax used by an author, regardless of the intentional meaning that the author intended for the reader to find in a passage. It is because of this that John Green failed a buzzfeed quiz on his own book because the way he wrote his books and the way they have been interpreted by society differ in opinions. Does this make one of them more right than the other? According to postmodernism both views are valid and correct, yet I would argue that John Green's intentions within the text are the true reasoning behind the words used because he wrote them.

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After reading the Communist Manifesto, my view point of communism changed from a symbol of hatred and violence to a economic and social system that in a perfect society could work. The only issue is that for this solution to work everyone has to be on board and contribute to the bettering of society. In this article they talk about how Communism is potentially rising in popularity again, due to the awareness that society has to it's inequality in class structure and the vast difference between those who have fortunes and those who do not. The social rise of the acknowledgement of the lower classes and prejudices of society are giving way to a class and economic struggle in America, but will that turn to Communism? There is definitely a longing for equality among the struggling lower class but what that looks like is unclear. The most interesting point made in this article is that in 2015 The Communist Manifesto was a best seller in England. Is that attributed to the desire to learn about history or the desire to change the present for a better future?

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Today, as we mark the centenary of the February Revolution - prequel to the November coup of Lenin's Bolsheviks - history has turned again. China and Russia both deploy symbols of their Communist heritage to strengthen an anti-liberal nationalism; in the West, confidence in free-market capitalism has not recovered from the financial crash of 2008, and new forces of the far right and activist left vie for popularity. In America, the unexpected strength of the independent socialist Bernie Sanders in last year's Democratic race, and in Spain, the electoral gains of the new Podemos party, led by a former Communist, are signs of some grass-roots resurgence on the left. In 2015 Britain, Marx and Engels's 1848 classic, "The Communist Manifesto," was a best seller.

So did I witness Communism's last hurrah that day in Moscow, or is a Communism remodeled for the 21st century struggling to be born?

There are hints of an answer in this complex, century-long epic, a narrative arc full of false starts, near-deaths and unpredicted revivals.

Take the life of Semyon Kanatchikov. The son of a former serf, he left rural poverty for a factory job and the thrill of modernity. Energetic and sociable, Kanatchikov set out to improve himself with "The Self-Teacher of Dance and Good Manners" as his guide. Once in Moscow, he joined a socialist discussion circle, and ultimately the Bolshevik party.

Kanatchikov's experience made him receptive to revolutionary ideas: a keen awareness of the gulf between rich and poor, a sense that an old order was blocking the rise of the new, and a hatred of arbitrary power. Communists offered clear-cut, convincing solutions. Unlike liberals, they championed economic equality; but unlike anarchists, they embraced modern industry and state planning; and against moderate socialists, they argued that change must come through revolutionary class struggle.

In practice, these ideals were difficult to combine. An over-powerful state tended to stifle growth while elevating new elites, and the violence of revolution brought with it periodic hunts for "enemies." Kanatchikov, too, became a victim. Though awarded prestigious appointments after the revolution, his association with Stalin's archrival, Trotsky, brought about his demotion in 1926.

By then, the outlook for Communism was grim. The first flames of revolution in Central Europe in the aftermath of World War I had been extinguished. The U.S.S.R. found itself isolated, and Communist parties elsewhere were small and beleaguered. The American-forged modernity of the Roaring Twenties was unapologetically consumerist, not communist.

But the flaws of laissez-faire soon came to Communism's rescue. The Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Depression that followed made socialist ideas of equality and state planning a compelling alternative to the invisible hand of the market. Communist militancy also emerged as one of the few political forces prepared to resist the threat of fascism.

Even the unpromising terrain of the United States, uncongenial to collectivism and godless socialism, became fertile ground. Aided by Moscow's abandonment in 1935 of its sectarian doctrine for a policy of supporting "popular fronts," American Communists made common cause with moderate leftists against fascism. Al Richmond, a New York journalist at The Daily Worker, recalled the new optimism as he and his colleagues spent evenings in an Italian restaurant drinking toasts "to life as it was just then, to that era, to its portents and hopes, sure of our responses to the rhythm of this time, for in it we heard our own beat."

Such optimism was shared by a select group. A victim of Stalin's purges, Semyon Kanatchikov died in the gulag in 1940.

Many were willing to overlook Stalin's Terror for the sake of anti-fascist unity. But Communism's second coming in the late '30s and early '40s did not long outlast the defeat of fascism. As the Cold War intensified, Communism's identification with Soviet empire in Eastern Europe compromised its claim to be a liberator. In Western Europe, a reformed, regulated capitalism, encouraged by the United States, provided higher living standards and welfare states. Command economies that made sense in wartime were less suited to peace.

But if Communism was waning in the global North, in the South it waxed. There, Communists' promises of rapid, state-led modernization captured the imagination of many anticolonial nationalists. It was here that a third red wave swelled, breaking in East Asia in the 1940s and across the post-colonial South from the late 1960s.

For Geng Changsuo, a Chinese visitor to a model collective farm in Ukraine in 1952 - three years after Mao Zedong's Communist guerrillas entered Beijing - the legacy of 1917 was still potent. A sober peasant leader from Wugong, a village about 120 miles south of Beijing, he was transformed by his trip. Back home, he shaved his beard and mustache, donned Western clothes and evangelized for agricultural collectivization and the miraculous tractor.

Revolutionary China only strengthened Washington's determination to contain Communism. But as America fought its disastrous war in Vietnam, a new generation of Marxist nationalists emerged in the South, attacking the "neo-imperialism" they believed their moderate socialist elders had tolerated. The Cuban-sponsored Tricontinental Conference of African, Latin American and Asian socialists in 1966 introduced a new wave of revolutions; by 1980, Marxist-Leninist states extended from Afghanistan to Angola, South Yemen to Somalia.

The West also saw a Marxist revival in the '60s, but its student radicals were ultimately more committed to individual autonomy, democracy in everyday life and cosmopolitanism than to Leninist discipline, class struggle and state power. The career of the German student firebrand Joschka Fischer is a striking example. A member of a group named Revolutionary Struggle who tried to inspire a Communist uprising among autoworkers in 1971, he later became a leader of the German Green Party.

The emergence from the late '70s of an American-led order dominated by global markets, followed by the fall of Soviet Communism in the late '80s, caused a crisis for the radical left everywhere. Mr. Fischer, like many other 1960s students, adapted to the new world: As German foreign minister, he supported the 1999 American bombing over Kosovo (against the forces of the former Communist Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic), and he backed Germany's welfare cuts in 2003.

In the South, the International Monetary Fund forced market reforms on indebted post-Communist countries, and some former Communist elites proved eager converts to neoliberalism. Only a handful of nominally Communist states now remain: North Korea and Cuba, and the more capitalist China, Vietnam and Laos.

Today, more than a quarter-century after the collapse of the U.S.S.R., is a fourth incarnation of Communism possible?

One major obstacle is the post-'60s split between an old left that prioritizes economic equality and the heirs of Mr. Fischer, who stress cosmopolitan values, gender politics and multiculturalism. Moreover, championing the interests of the underprivileged on a global scale seems an almost impossible task. The 2008 crash only intensified the left's dilemma, creating an opportunity for radical nationalists like Donald J. Trump and Marine Le Pen to exploit anger at economic inequality in the global North.

We are only at the beginning of a period of major economic change and social turmoil. As a highly unequal tech-capitalism fails to provide enough decently paid jobs, the young may adopt a more radical economic agenda. A new left might then succeed in uniting the losers, both white-collar and blue-collar, in the new economic order. Already, we're seeing demands for a more redistributive state. Ideas like the universal basic income, which the Netherlands and Finland are experimenting with, are close in spirit to Marx's vision of Communism's ability to supply the wants of all - "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

This is all a long way from Moscow's Red Square in 1987, even farther from Petrograd's Winter Palace in 1917. There will be no return to the Communism of five-year plans and gulags. Yet if there is one thing this turbulent history teaches us, it is that "last hurrahs" can be as illusory as the "end of ideology" predicted in the 1950s or Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" of 1989.

Lenin no longer lives, the old Communism may be dead, but the sense of injustice that animated them is very much alive.

Correction: February 24, 2017

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Today, as we mark the centenary of the February Revolution - prequel to the November coup of Lenin's Bolsheviks - history has turned again. China and Russia both deploy symbols of their Communist heritage to strengthen an anti-liberal nationalism; in the West, confidence in free-market capitalism has not recovered from the financial crash of 2008, and new forces of the far right and activist left vie for popularity.

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This week we discussed the effects of Christianity on the furthering of Capitalism and there were mixed opinions acrossed the room. Although no one meant to bring up points in support of the prosperity gospel there was a revelation that some people are called to a life that ends up placing them in a position of wealth. It can be very had to reconcile God with money because of how selfish money makes people. Although the intention of your wealth could be to give generously and be a charitable individual, that is normally easier said than done. Josh brought up a wonderful point that it is extremely hard to figure out how one will use the money if it ends up being acquired. I thought this graphic applied nicely to our discussion because the point of following what you may deem your calling may be to follow God's plan for your life, but it can end up leading you into a place of great wealth that leads you astray. This becomes a problem because your walk with God should not be a walk towards fortune.

The graphic I am referring to is the illustration by Tim Bower.

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How capitalism and Christianity aligned in modern America

Capitalism is a system braced by stories. Consider the rise of the liberal individual, a kind of atomistic personhood, distinct from all other persons. It seems the whole Enlightenment had a hand in creating this particular view of man-yet the concept was unknown to the people of the medieval and ancient worlds. The idea was not intentionally developed as a thread in capitalism's web of self-justification, but it has been recruited for such purposes, where it underwrites much free-market discourse about the primacy of the individual over the collective. This is only one of the many accounts which have been absorbed into the vast narrative support structure of capitalism-that is, the series of stories that make life under capitalism seem plausible, positive, and even necessary. In the United States, Christianity might be capitalism's most impressive conscription so far.

In Kevin Kruse's One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, the author lays out a deftly detailed history of Christianity's service to capitalism in the United States. Christianity was brought into the service of laissez-faire economics in Puritan devotion to work and thrift, but the decisive moment at which Christianity fused with free enterprise in the American psyche occurred, Kruse argues, in the middle of the twentieth century. Nicole Aschoff's The New Prophets of Capital, on the other hand, offers a series of case studies on the storytellers whose narratives about free enterprise and well-being are shouldering capitalism along today. Kruse's investigation begins around the time of the New Deal and follows the emergence of our distinctly American capitalist Christianity through its zenith in the 1980s. Aschoff picks up this story with a close look at today's charismatic capitalists: Sheryl Sandberg, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey, among others.

But in the gap between these two books-between the late '70s and early '80s, where the bulk of Kruse's narrative leaves off, and the postmillennial world we know today-the ground has shifted. The preoccupation with Christian doctrine that animated the ardent pro-capitalists of yesteryear has subsided to a vaguely spiritual moralism. We now live in the age of "moral therapeutic deism," where the shapes and colors of religion are imported into mass-market self-help schemes. And while the Christian right persists in the same old political battles (sexuality, marriage, education, et cetera), its strength appears to be waning: The once coherent evangelical voting bloc is splintering, and titans of industry intent on fostering a pro-capitalist politics no longer seem reliant upon it to bolster their project. Our most ardent pro-capitalists, as Aschoff demonstrates, don't generally speak in terms of Christ and country any longer, but rather in modes of self-improvement and actualization.

Will the fates of Christianity and capitalism depart, or have they been too tightly interwoven in American thought to adopt diverging paths? What will become of Christianity in the United States once capitalism is done with it, and vice versa? This is where Kruse and Aschoff, with their careful surveys of the past, offer guidance to the future.

Kruse's One Nation Under God opens with a moment of widespread anti-capitalist sentiment. Following the desolation of the Great Depression, Kruse reports, mistrust of financiers and their associates was at a perilous high. In the early years of the twentieth century, a large population of people depended not upon the abstract dealings of people and assets, but upon the tangible fluctuations of earth, weather, and disease. Famines, pestilences, and storms all had their own narratives, but the Great Depression was a new kind of plague, and it produced a new kind of story, with the greed and pride of the rich as the catalyst for destruction.

Concerned that populist politics might endanger their wealth, America's monied interests did what they do best: They bought a solution. It came in the form of James W. Fifield Jr., a Congregationalist pastor who made his fortune in Southern California by preaching to the fabulously wealthy and accepting their patronage. Fifield, Kruse notes, was especially gifted at assuring wealthy Christians that their riches were evidence of virtue rather than vice. A philosophical descendant of Max Weber, Fifield married Christian thought with a new era of economic development, and spread the gospel through his organization, Spiritual Mobilization. Its mission was simple: to stamp out Christian support for a generous welfare state-which paired naturally with New Deal concern for the poor, elderly, and vulnerable-and to advance a new theory of Christian libertarianism.

Spiritual Mobilization sought to influence ministers across the country, and with its bottomless monetary resources, it was doomed to success. Kruse's account is startling in part because of just how vulgar the whole affair was: Christianity was rented out, quite consciously, to buttress a shambling narrative about the continued dominance of the monied class in a performance that even Marx would have found blunt.

As the middle of the twentieth century approached, Spiritual Mobilization circulated literature touting the righteousness of the libertarian-Christian gospel, and, in 1951, decided to host a series of events celebrating the newly minted notion of "freedom under God." A turn of phrase coined by Fifield himself, the rhetoric was a hit, and private companies voraciously reproduced it; the Utah Power & Light Company, among others, printed ads and funded festivities to advance the notion that Christian deference to industry is a vital part of the American Way. This stew of supply-side economics, small government, hard-core U.S. patriotism, and Christian rhetoric was entirely novel, and smashingly effective. When we look back now on the McCarthy era and find Christian verses interwoven with tirades against communism, this is the carefully engineered blend we are revisiting.

We now live in the age of "moral therapeutic deism," where the shapes and colors of religion are imported into mass-market self-help schemes.

Proponents of this newly constructed ideology were manifold, powerful, and well funded: Kruse names Billy Graham as a spiritual inheritor to the early efforts of Christian libertarians like Fifield. Graham's preaching was sensational, and won the support of tycoons like Texas oilman Sid Richardson, who helped launch Graham's career in Washington, D.C. Graham's ascent opened the way for other pastors with political aspirations, like Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority cohort, to wax passionate about the gospel while raking in cash from committed capitalists delighted by the arranged marriage of God and mammon. Kruse deftly outlines how the arteries of money and power that we now take for granted-between the progenitors of the Christian right on one side, and preachers, industrialists, and politicians on the other-were built.

If there is one underlying argument in Kruse's book, it is that free-market economics and Christianity were not always the twin pillars of a uniquely American gospel. And yet here we are: Ted Cruz kicked off the long election season by spinning a free-market yarn to the student body of the world's largest Christian college, also lamenting that most born-again Christians stay home on voting days, robbing him of votes and leaving the economy in the hands of wealthy financiers. Thanks to the tireless efforts of the pastors and politicians Kruse profiles, the disparity between the Christian ethos and the spirit of capitalism is now little more than a periodic left-Christian cri de coeur .

What happened to the anti-capitalist Christianity of yesteryear? Consider the robust Christian socialist movements of the late nineteenth century, which flourished under Victorians like John Ruskin and William Morris. It's a question worth pursuing because, as Aschoff demonstrates in her new journalistic set of case studies, the narratives that prop up capitalism are not stable.

Aschoff opens with a somewhat startling revelation that helps place Kruse's historical account in the context of capitalism's broader story. Narratives, both critical and supportive, are necessary for capitalism, because criticism forces it "to evolve and temporarily resolve some of its contradictions ... thus preserving it as a system for the long haul." "Indeed," Aschoff notes, "capital's ability to periodically present a new set of legitimating principles that facilitate the willing participation of society accounts for its remarkable longevity despite periodic bouts of deep crisis." Capitalism, therefore, is a system that is in a constant state of re-explaining itself, producing stories that present it as necessary despite its failures and stories that cast it in a positive light despite shifts in popular sentiment.

By "prophets" of capital, Aschoff means the old-fashioned sociological sense of the term, as used by Max Weber and as distinct from "priests." While priests, Weber argued, maintain old practices and enforce stable norms, prophets renew old stories or produce novel ones, building bases out of sheer charisma. Priests deal in the mundane problems of daily life, applying static premises to failing marriages, financial upsets, illness, anxiety, death; prophets, meanwhile, insist upon abstraction, detest minutiae, and push dizzyingly powerful narratives. Aschoff's prophets of capital, which she considers in a series of wry and adroit case studies of people like Gates, Sandberg, and Mackey, have become famous for being rich and successful. Each of them, Aschoff argues, tells a different story with the same outcome: to patch up leaks in capitalism and advance its shuddering bulk for one more day. If in midcentury America it was Christianity that was deployed to offer this endorsement, now it is Oprah.

But in each of Aschoff's careful considerations of capitalism's storytellers, glimmers of the past pro-capitalist Christian crusades shine through. She traces Mackey's capitalist ethos of responsible entrepreneurship to the Physiocrats, for example, a set of eighteenth-century French philosophers including Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot and François Quesnay, both Catholics and fathers of libertarian economics. Mackey, like his Catholic forebears, senses a natural order to the world; you can resolve all matters between men simply by leaving them alone. Just as Turgot and Quesnay co-opted pieces of Catholic natural-law theory to advance economic liberalism, Mackey borrows from Physiocratic commentary on natural order to press for a lifestyle of organic-therapeutic consumption that takes the place of a genuinely revolutionary politics. We will be healed, to hear Mackey tell it, by eating right and being kind to one another. No need for any intervention from states or unions.

Capitalism's narratives, Aschoff implicitly reveals, always cannibalize their predecessors, repackaging old stories to shore up discontent. While Oprah's lifestyle branding is mostly about how to achieve happiness through a vague mix of nondescript spirituality, bootstraps-hoisting, and endless therapeutic introspection, her schema is new only in its styling. Long before Oprah took to the airwaves and pages to proclaim her own story of self-invention, the prosperity gospel preachers of the '70s and '80s-folks like prolific televangelists Jim Bakker, Creflo Dollar, and Kenneth Copeland-had brought self-improvement testimonials sprinkled with holy water to rapt middle Americans. The spiritual inheritors of these televangelists are, according to Kate Bowler's 2013 book, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, self-help ministers like Joel Osteen, who has unsurprisingly enjoyed plenty of time on Oprah's stage. Oprah's version of spirituality is similar enough to Osteen's, but nonspecific. While Osteen and his overtly Christian ilk minister to their flocks, Oprah's message is broad enough to be enjoyed by all: a better business decision, at any rate.

In other words, the prophets of capitalism have a way of using the workable parts of older pro-capitalist narratives to meet the needs of changing audiences, while shedding the vestigial bits. As religiosity drops off in the United States, replaced either by faithlessness or individual spirituality, capitalism will have to reformat its defenses to match those proclivities, rather than catering purely to committed Christians. And that may ultimately be the best possible thing for Christianity in the United States.

After all, if the Christian ethos has suffered any great harm from its recruitment in support of capitalism, it has been the tamping down of a uniquely anti-capitalist, revolutionary sentiment in the Gospel. Pope Francis, being from the global South, has repeatedly criticized trickle-down economics from a Christian perspective, an approach that registers as baffling to a certain segment of his American audience. But within the Catholic tradition, criticism of capitalism is perfectly common: It is only in the U.S. context, beset by a curious interlude of manufactured hypercapitalist Christianity, that the Pope's economics seem jarring. Capital, Aschoff observes, is inclined to glide from one narrative to the next as its needs change. If the Christian story is the latest to be shucked aside by capital, then Christianity might find itself slipping the grip of a rather oppressive relationship.

American Christians would then be free to offer up a genuinely revolutionary Christian politics: one that neither seeks to bolster capitalism blatantly nor offer meager patches for its systemic problems. Having a historical perspective on the ways in which Christianity was co-opted in service of each of those purposes could help new Christian activists avoid the pitfalls of the recent past. Perhaps Christianity's long rendezvous with capitalism has been a necessary crucible, and one that may be sputtering toward its end.

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Capitalism and Christianity Didn't Always Go Hand in Hand in America

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How capitalism and Christianity aligned in modern America Capitalism is a system braced by stories. Consider the rise of the liberal individual, a kind of atomistic personhood, distinct from all other persons. It seems the whole Enlightenment had a hand in creating this particular view of man-yet the concept was unknown to the people of the medieval and ancient worlds.

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This is extremely relevant to the questions discussed in class this week. Part of the issue with coexistence is the ability to see beyond your own perspective and tolerate or validate the viewpoint of others. Many like to say this is possible because they believe it is happening in the world, but is it really happening? This picture explains the problems with the phrase and the popular car decal. The two symbols discussed in the last sentence are Atheism and Humanism, which are both heavily discussed in the honors college. The reason people were incorrectly discrediting Freud this week is due to their inability to see how he was looking at religions across the board and had an atheistic perspective. The basis for his argument was his atheism so saying he was incorrect because he did not agree with the bible completely ignores the insight he gives into what theism, monotheism, and more specifically, Christianity look like from an outsiders perspective. Of course, expecting him to get all of the details of Christianity correct from an outsiders perspective would be foolish because that would require him to have faith, from his lack of faith many of the beliefs that he held to be true about monotheism were valid. Valid does not make them true, he had errors in his thinking but religion is merely an illusion until it is proven, which cannot be done on this earth. This explanation gives interesting insight into why it is difficult for us, as a christian honors class, to discuss other religions objectively because by nature our beliefs counteract those of other religions and belief systems.

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After my rant about the misguided Christian COEXIST poster, the folks at Truth-Saves made one that's much more realistic (click on the image for a larger version):

I appreciate the addition at the very end

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After my rant about the misguided Christian COEXIST poster, the folks at Truth-Saves made one that's much more realistic (click on the image for a larger version): I appreciate the addition at the very end

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It is undeniable, based on merely the definition of the word that humans are animals. As a result of the way we were created and our biological factors, the social structures and behaviors of "lower animals" reflect that of man. The only absolute advantage humans have is our long distance running. Our senses are no where near as strong as other species. We are most advanced in intellectual development but that does not diminish the value of animals and their witt. Our ability to communicate is what makes us truly superior because it takes the emotional and social processes to a more intimate level of interaction that aims to not only survive but to thrive in comfort. Our reproductive strategy, K, shows that the survival of the fittest mentality is  naturally diminished because of our life expectancy.

https://visual.ly/community/infographic/science/difference-between-humans-and-animals

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The Present Age discusses the influence of the media and how the media shapes the "people". This cartoon shows the effects the media had on the elections, just like stated in the article we read the media picks a person of prominence. Once they get this person they attack them until they have been stripped of their pride and no longer have a valid voice. The only difference was that since Donald Trump won the election the battle has not ended, the media will do anything to discredit him. They have come into the light as diminishing the truth for the cost of a story, just like NBC with the Trayvon Martin case they care more about making money than about identifying and delivering the truth. The media is finally fighting in the light and fully seen as manipulative and levellers who need checks and balances.