The Great Physician: mainline Protestant ministers’ expectations of doctors, 1840–1900

I argue that mainline Protestant clergymen adapted to the scientific and cultural developments of the post-Darwin era by encouraging a separation of bodily healing and spiritual healing that was unprecedented in Christianity. I use ministers’ depictions of Jesus in their addresses to physicians to illustrate this change. In 1840 ministers insisted that doctors’ value lay in their willingness to mimic Jesus’s example by healing both bodies and souls. As doctors gained authority in the late 1800s, the clergyman’s new ideal doctor stayed abreast of scientific developments and stuck to healing bodies. Ministers increasingly portrayed Jesus as an exclusively spiritual healer.     

C.S. Lewis: an Irish writer

This article examines the effect of C.S. Lewis's Irish background on his work. It attempts to contradict the assumption that this Belfast-born writer should be included in the English and not the Irish canon. It emphasises that Lewis saw himself as Irish, was seen by others as Irish, and that his Irish background, contrary to what some have written, was important to him throughout his lifetime. It goes on to demonstrate the ways in which his work was influenced by his youth in Ireland and by the Irish mythology that he loved. Furthermore, this article maintains that, as a child of pre-partition Ireland with roots throughout the island, Lewis was influenced by the country as a whole, not just his native Ulster. Finally, it attempts to understand why Lewis, a proud Irishman, did not do more to promote himself as an Irish writer.     

The Protestant working class in Belfast: education and civic erosion – an alternative analysis

This paper explores and reassesses the issues of social decline, educational underachievement and civic erosion in relation to the Protestant working class in Belfast. Prior to the ‘Troubles’ the Protestant working class in Belfast had at its heart a civic-mindedness which was in tune with working-class communities across the UK at the time. This civic-mindedness encouraged the growth of extended communities and placed an importance on church attendance and educational achievement; something which has been conveniently ignored in most analyses. Owing to population movements in Greater Belfast which followed the violence that followed the introduction of internment without trial in August 1971 Protestant church congregations dwindled and school attendances dropped significantly. The paper ultimately seeks to provide a ‘long view’ of the Protestant working-class experience in order to assist those who are concerned with the problems facing it in the current era.     

From the ‘spirit of capital’ to the “spirit” of capitalism: The transition in German economic thought between Lujo Brentano and Max Weber

I dedicate this essay to the memory of the late Wolfgang Mommsen—the subject would have been congenial to him. It is one of a series of offshoots from a central project: a scholarly edition of Max Weber's Protestant Ethic with commentary. When I first told Prof. Mommsen of my plan in 1994 he looked me full in the face and gave a characteristic growl: “All that work!” Here was a man who knew what he was about. My thanks to Ross McKibbin and Keith Tribe for reading this paper in draft.

The article begins by examining Max Weber's relations with Lujo Brentano, much the most important “precursor” to Weber in the field of economics. In particular, Brentano conducted a form of parallel inquiry into the rise of ‘the spirit of capital’ in England 35 years before Weber looked for the origins of “spirit” of capitalism there, and the contrast between these two ideas casts much light both on Brentano and on Weber's Protestant Ethic. This personal history leads into a broader history of the transition in German economic thought between the 1860s – the formative decade for Brentano but also the era of Marx's Capital – and that of Weber's generation coming to maturity c.1890. Marx and Weber remain the two great canonical thinkers and original minds; but any authentic historical comparison between Marx and Weber must take in Brentano. The essence of the contrast between the generations is that between Weber's novel conception of an ethical ‘capitalism’, and the materialism and naturalism underpinning Brentano's and Marx's ‘capital’, although Weber and Brentano are alike as liberals, democrats and bourgeois.     

Trust,business groups and social capital: building a Protestant entrepreneurial network in nineteenth-century Naples

Abstract

This article explores the behaviour of a group of foreign entrepreneurs (mainly Swiss and Germans) who settled in southern Italy during the nineteenth century, establishing cotton manufacturing, creating a religious community, importing technologies, machines and patterns of management. These entrepreneurs shared a high level of training and culture and they all belonged to Protestant denominations. In the context of this foreign entrepreneurial community, the article examines the role played by friendship, kinship, origins, education and religion in shaping the network that linked groups of Protestant businessmen across Europe, emphasizing how these manufacturing firms relied on forms of cooperation, solidarity and physical proximity that were consolidated and perpetuated across more than three generations.     

Scab Ministers,Striking Saints: Christianity and Class Conflict in 1894 Chicago

Throughout 1894, Chicago's churches were as divided by class as the nation itself. During the Pullman strike and boycott, the city's leading Protestant and Catholic authorities hewed to an ideology of contract freedom that precluded support for the American Railway Union. Meanwhile, a handful of young Protestant ministers championed the strikers, echoing the criticisms of those working-class Protestants who had long decried the established churches’ ties to capital. This latter bloc expressed its frustration not merely with words but also through uprisings within local churches and even by founding a church of its own. In light of these findings, the author argues that a grassroots social Christianity preceded an elite Social Gospel; and furthermore, that the participation of working-class persons in the contests over the shape of modern Christianity demands a rethinking of the boundaries of both religious and working-class history.