Abstract
A friend of mine recently remarked that money has no religion. I suggested at the time that maybe that was the whole problem with the stock market and banking in recent years. The religious neutrality of the market-not to say its irreligiousness and proneness to abandon any ethical norms, religious or secular-may lie at the foundation of much that has gone wrong in the whole area of money and the market in the last few years. The market has often been both an ethical and religious concern in the past, in the widest sense of ethical and religious concerns. Four historical varieties of that ethical and religious concern in the eastern Mediterranean might give us pause before asserting that money has no religion.
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Notes
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as well as W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Medina (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), pp. 221–228. This work will be cited below as Watt, Medina
Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, MA/London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 68–69.
Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 188.
George Weigel, “Caritas in Veritate in Gold and Red,” available at National Review Online (July 7, 2009).
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© 2015 Albert Erisman and David Gautschi
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Ryan, P.J. (2015). God and the Market: Four Settings in the Eastern Mediterranean. In: Erisman, A., Gautschi, D. (eds) The Purpose of Business. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137503244_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137503244_6
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