So, if your employer is introducing a new shift pattern which will be difficult for you because of your religion, it may be that you are the victim of discrimination because of religion. Ruskin makes a distinction between wealth and what he calls “illth.” The distinction is qualitative: Wealth and illth are relationships between a good and the character of the person. The doctrine of original sin, which holds that all men and women are born sharing in the sin of Adam and Eve, was ridiculous to Jefferson: he believed that a rational, loving God would not punish one person for the sins of another. I’m really concerned, for instance, about the enthusiasm many on the left are displaying for automation, even for “fully automated luxury communism.” I’m fearful that left technophiliacs are outsourcing their political imaginations to Silicon Valley; the thinking seems to be that Elon Musk and others will achieve all the technological breakthroughs, and socialism will be all about taking the technology away from them.

Some of the most renowned passages of Romantic poetry, for instance, point to a reality that transcends and suffuses the visible world: Blake’s “Heaven in a Wild Flower,” Wordsworth’s “sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused.” “Imagination” was the name the Romantics gave to this modern sacramental sensibility, and they meant by it not “fantasy” but rather a capacity for vision, the ability to “see” what’s really all around us. Philip Freneau, a voice of 18th-century rationalism and widely known as the “poet of the Revolution,” was an aging 63 when he wrote “On the Universality.” William Cullen Bryant, in contrast, was a young poet of 23 when he wrote “To a Waterfowl,” one of the earliest American Romantic poems. This is why I argue in the book that the tradition of Romantic anti-capitalism contains one of the most humane and generous treasuries of possibilities. The Sunnis, however, regard Ali as well as the three caliphs before him as rightly guided and themselves as the true adherents to the Sunnah, or the prophet’s tradition. Ruskin’s preface to Unto This Last is an early sketch of what became the welfare state, and many early Labour Party members, as well as many of the rank and file of the trade union movement, avowed that much of their attraction to socialism stemmed from reading inexpensive copies of Unto This Last.

There is ample historical evidence indicating that Arabs and Muslims interacted with India from the very early days of Islam, although trade relations had existed since ancient times. This article aims to present statistical information on the number of adherents to various religions, including major faiths such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and others, as well as smaller religious communities. In Capital, commodity fetishism becomes the capitalist surrogate for Catholic sacramentality: Where sacrament directs divine grace through material objects or religious rituals, commodity fetishism conducts the power of money through a pecuniary alchemy of objects. I wish that people were, in fact, more materialistic in the sense that they should cultivate and exhibit more appreciation for the joys of the material world. Capitalism needs people to be dissatisfied. There’s a tendency among religious critics of capitalism to focus their ire on consumerism, which becomes nothing more than a moral failing for which frugality becomes the healing virtue.

The most notable book here would be Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism in the 21st Century. DSJ: Let me transition a bit here to a different subject. But I want to make two observations here. While some Romantics really did want to return to the past, most did not; they wanted to preserve what they thought of value in premodern societies and recast them in modern form. At the same time, while certainly not all Romantics were religious (Percy Shelley and Morris, to cite two), Romanticism has often been a brand of religious sensibility, the heir to and the modern form of the sacramental imagination of medieval Christianity. The law allows any religious group to apply for legal public right status (comprehensive religious nonprofit status). What they’re really railing against is how the technocratic and managerial elites have profited handsomely from “disruption,” “innovation,” etc. We have to remember that, as Michael Kazin could remind us, there have been right and left versions of populism, and that populism hasn’t always been bound up with racism and xenophobia.