Tempus Redime

While I was not looking a corporation decided to appropriate my previous domain name. I begin again. To recap, for the past quarter century I have been focusing more attention on the ways capitalism has reshaped the spiritual and religious landscape of our times. I prefigured this theme in my book Weber and the Persistence of Religion (London: Routledge, 2009). Taking the commodity as a social form, I showed how the commodity’s peculiar two-fold form shaped how social scientists interpret religious formations. Along lines suggested by Immanuel Kant, the two-fold form of the commodity has brought social scientists to qualitatively differentiate the surface forms of religions from their abstract immaterial value forms. At the same time, because modern religious formations are also structured around the two-fold form of the commodity, religious practitioners have embraced this two-fold form into how they understand themselves, their gods, and their world. Not long ago, however, prior to the appearance of the commodity in Europe, religious formations everywhere, including Christianity, held bodies to be sacred. They valued things, including divine things, for the substances out of which they were composed, not for the equal units of abstract time consumed in their composition. With the arrival of the commodity form in Europe, religious practitioners began to doubt the value of surface forms. By the sixteenth century half of Christendom had renounced what since the fourth century all Christians had confessed: that God was made flesh. As commodity production and exchange spread, all religious formations adopted this same peculiar two-fold form. There is much to unpack in this claim. I will not do that here. Welcome to the new site.