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Aim:To examine how physicians’ life stances affect their attitudes to end-of-life decisions and their actual end-of-life decision-making.Methods:Practising physicians from various specialties involved in the care of dying patients in Belgium, Denmark, The Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and Australia received structured questionnaires on end-of-life care, which included questions about their life stance. Response rates ranged from 53% in Australia to 68% in Denmark. General attitudes, intended behaviour with respect to two hypothetical patients, and actual behaviour were compared between all large life-stance groups in each country.Results:Only small differences in life stance were found in all countries in general attitudes and intended and actual behaviour with regard to various end-of-life decisions. However, with regard to the administration of drugs explicitly intended to hasten the patient’s death (PAD), physicians with specific religious affiliations had significantly less accepting attitudes, and less willingness to perform it, than non-religious physicians. They had also actually performed PAD less often. However, in most countries, both Catholics (up to 15.7% in The Netherlands) and Protestants (up to 20.4% in The Netherlands) reported ever having made such a decision.Discussion:The results suggest that religious teachings influence to some extent end-of-life decision-making, but are certainly not blankly accepted by physicians, especially when dealing with real patients and circumstances. Physicians seem to embrace religious belief in a non-imperative way, allowing adaptation to particular situations.

When historians and philosophers of science discuss instrumentality, they are primarily referring to an epistemological and metaphysical position that holds that science is concerned not with making truth claims but rather with predictability. Scholars correctly locate the origins of instrumental natural philosophy in the seventeenth century, when a drive toward the practical, applied study of nature transformed natural philosophy from a contemplative pursuit—so the story goes—into something more recognizably like modern science. I argue, however, that if we conceive of instrumentality primarily in this way we neglect one of its crucial elements. Seventeenth-century arguments about instrumental, practical natural philosophy were not just methodological claims; they were also normative claims about what natural philosophy should be. When explored in its historical context, this drive toward instrumentality turns out to be a Protestant project to build the kingdom of Christ on earth, to improve mankind’s condition and reform the world. The seventeenth-century British colonies in North America provided a space to construe natural philosophy as a work of Christian charity, an endeavor that was useful to mankind. This article attempts to rethink our understanding of instrumentality by historicizing this concept in the early modern Atlantic context.

This article examines the impact of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism on the recent welfare reform movement and the 19th-century campaign to abolish outdoor relief. Contemporary advocates of welfare reform adopted the 19th-century model of charity organization and reform as their exemplar. The welfare reform movement focused on the morals of the poor and \"welfare dependence, \" while the 19th-century movement attempted to eliminate the distribution of aid outside the poorhouse and to discourage \"indiscriminate almsgiving\" on the part of individuals. We argue that the Protestant ethos represents a uniquely Anglo-American variety of Calvinist Puritanism. We also show that while this ethos is a fairly constant component of American culture, it has under certain conditions produced severe retrenchments in aid to the poor, that is, welfare reform and the abolition of outdoor relief. These conditions include the presence of a tight labor market and political mobilization by advocates of reform. Drawing on Ragin's (1987) model of conjunctural causation, we argue that both conditions must be met before such reform movements are likely to occur. We also employ the comparative method to show why alternative explanations based on economic and demographic factors are inadequate to explain the events in question.

“To stand against Israel is to stand against God,” declared Jerry Falwell in his 1980 missive,Listen America.¹ Falwell’s explosion on the political scene with the formation of the religious political activist group, the Moral Majority, signaled a dramatic shift in the relationship between religion and politics in America. The cultural and political relevance of liberal mainline Protestants dissipated in the 1980s, the result of a trend begun in the previous decade. It was replaced by the growing numbers and power of a new political player—American evangelicalism. Falwell’s declaration about God and Israel represented a new strain of religious

Th is chapter is about defining Pentecostalism/s, in view of the fact that definitions are often static and prone to generate confusion. It seeks to give some clarity to the discussion of ways in which Pentecostalism can be described and analyzed, and it tries to offer direction through the maze of different shifting forms of Pentecostalism/s. In addition, it outlines some of the ways in which this movement can be identified by using the family resemblance analogy. It looks at the parameters by which we make categories, offers a flexible and overlapping taxonomy, and examines how various scholars have approached

Weber’s most famous book isThe Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It is regarded by many sociologists as one of the key texts in their discipline. Its central question is: why did capitalism begin in Western Europe rather than in Asia? Weber’s answer focussed on religion – in particular, the Protestant Reformation. The book is important because it moved sociology from a concern with general evolutionary patterns to a comparative approach. Writers such as Auguste Comte had devised a universal scheme whereby societies moved through a series of stages. His three main stages were the ‘theological’, where religious

During his years as a professor in Heidelberg (1894–1914), Ernst Troeltsch engaged himself intensively with historical studies of the relation between Protestantism and the origins of the modern world. These writings¹ provide a rich and multi-faceted picture of Troeltsch’s theory of modernity, and demonstrate Troeltsch’s unique way of exploring and analyzing the role of religion in it. Like many other intellectuals in Heidelberg in the early 1900s, Troeltsch used interdisciplinary and historical research to illuminate questions about the modernization of society and to explore possible responses to the perceived crises of modernity resulting from rapid social change. Troeltsch and

The initial and, for G. W. F. Hegel, decisive clash in the Schleiermacher–Hegel conflict occurred in 1802, when, in the process of mounting a more general critique of the reflective philosophy of subjectivity (Faith and Knowledge), Hegel refers to Friedrich Schleiermacher's On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers as but a slight variation on the philosophy of Friedrich Jacobi; and because Jacobi's philosophical standpoint is maligned, Schleiermacher is guilty by association. The Schleiermacher–Jacobi association is illustrative of Hegel's Jena period theory of philosophical criticism. Although Hegel might have misread Schleiermacher in other ways, he may well have been correct in this: For Schleiermacher, not unlike Kant, Fichte, and especially Jacobi, “what is truly Absolute is an absolute Beyond in faith and in feeling; for cognitive Reason it is nothing.” Before he arrived in Berlin, long before Marx's quip to the contrary, Hegel not only wanted to understand his contemporaries; he wanted also to change them.

In August 2014 an op-ed on faith and climate change appeared in theNew York Times. Frustrated with the prevalent antagonism between science and faith in climate change literature, Kristin Dombek describes a bridge she has constructed between her old Christian beliefs and her current climate concerns. Christianity—specifically the Lutheran-Reformed Heidelberg Catechism—taught her, she explains, how to “belong, body and soul,” to something bigger than herself. She compares overlapping journeys—one, toward a new faith in Darwin, the other, toward a way to cope with paralyzing, climate change–induced anxiety—to learning to float in the ocean. Just