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In his renowned article published in 1967, Lynn White Jr argues that a causal relationship exists between Christianity (grounded in the Bible) and the contemporary ecological crisis. ‘Western’ Christianity, insists White, is the world's most anthropocentric religion, and it is this anthropocentrism that underlies human harm of the environment. The ecological crisis, he argues, is a religious crisis. But White also suggests that since the roots of the ecological crisis are largely religious, the remedy must also be (broadly) religious. With White's words in mind, this chapter outlines a strategy for Christian communities to read the Bible in such a way that it might contribute to the emergence of an ecological sensibility that is appropriate to the environmental concerns of climate crisis in the twenty-first century. It then offers a brief ecological reading of Genesis 1 and 2, exploring how such an interpretation might provide faith communities with a foundation for re-conceiving the relationship between God, Earth and humanity. This chapter argues that, set alongside the ever-increasing scientific discoveries that point towards interdependence and the continuity of all life, the Bible has the potential to act as a powerful resource for Christian communities in the ongoing endeavour to alleviate environmental degradation.

In recent years, there has been no shortage of research on the enormous pressure women face to have children. Similarly, the pressures put on mothers and the impossibility for women to live up to the ideal standards of motherhood are increasingly the subject of scrutiny. However, a shadowy figure lurks in the cultural imagination: the woman who refuses to have a child, or worse, hates the children she has. If narratives of maternal distress, anxiety and regret represent ‘the last taboo’, then narratives of willful rejection exist even outside of those boundaries.

This chapter explores narratives of women who are villainised for their negative relationships to motherhood and mothering, in canonical texts of the Western Anglosphere culture. Drawing examples from the Bible, from Charles Dickens, and from the Disney corporation, Çakmak and Rumson demonstrate the variations and ongoing poignancy of the narrative that women who reject or fail to have children are evil.

To reexamine the Weber Thesis pertaining to the relationship between ascetic Protestantism – especially Calvinism – and modern capitalism, as between an economic “spirit” and an economic “structure,” in which the first is assumed to be the explanatory factor and the second the dependent variable.

The chapter provides an attempt to combine theoretical-empirical and comparative-historical approaches to integrate theory with evidence supplied by societal comparisons and historically specific cases.

The chapter identifies the general sociological core of the Weber Thesis as a classic endeavor in economic sociology (and thus substantive sociological theory) and separates it from its particular historical dimension in the form of an empirical generalization from history. I argue that such a distinction helps to better understand the puzzling double “fate” of the Weber Thesis in social science, its status of a model in economic sociology and substantive sociological theory, on the one hand, and its frequent rejection in history and historical economics, on the other. The sociological core of the Thesis, postulating that religion, ideology, and culture generally deeply impact economy, has proved to be more valid, enduring, and even paradigmatic, as in economic sociology, than its historical component establishing a special causal linkage between Calvinism and other types of ascetic Protestantism and the “spirit” and “structure” of modern capitalism in Western society at a specific point in history.

In addition to the two cases deviating from the Weber Thesis considered here, it is necessary to investigate and identify the validity of the Thesis with regard to concrete historical and empirical instances.

The chapter provides the first effort to systematically analyze and distinguish between the sociological core and the historical components of the Weber Thesis as distinct yet intertwined components.

The presence of Latin in heavy metal music ranges from full texts, intros, song and album titles to band names, pseudonyms, and literary quotations. This chapter sheds light on heavy metal's fascination with the history and ‘arcane’ sound of Latin, and investigates its patterns of use in lyrics with the help of Natural Language Processing tools and digitally-available linguistic resources. First, the authors collected a corpus of lyrics containing differing amounts of Latin and enhanced it with descriptive metadata. Next, the authors calculated the richness of the vocabulary and the distribution of content words. The authors processed the corpus with a morphological analyser and performed both a manual and a computational search for intertextuality, including allusions, paraphrase and verbatim quotations of literary sources. The authors show that, despite it being a dead language, Latin is very frequently used in metal. Its historical status appears to fascinate bands and lends itself well to those religious, epic and mysterious themes so characteristic of the heavy metal world. The widespread use of Latin in metal lyrics, however, sees many bands simply reusing Latin texts – mostly from the Bible – or even misspelling literary quotations.

Chapter 1 is entitled “Normative Scripture – Christian and American.” Here Pelikan considers the normative status of the two documents. Though their texts were “originally composed under very specific circumstances,” illumined by later scholarship, they have been “adopted by a community as its normative Great Code…occupying a position that in some profound sense stands beyond its own history” (pp. 4–5).That normative status is based on the assumption that it can be applied to any and all of the radically changed situations of later times, many of which the writers who originally framed it could not themselves conceivable have foreseen…. Therefore its words and phrases have for centuries called forth meticulous and sophisticated – and sometimes painfully convoluted – interpretation, as well as continual reinterpretation.…a massive corpus of authoritative, if often controversial, commentary. (p. 5)

While technical environment starts from western culture which is mainly based on Christianity, the associated ethical concern of the operation of technology can be varied depending on the sociotechnical environment and/or organizational culture. Ethical standards – irrespective of religions – can be used to govern the appropriate behaviors of employees in technical environment. Religions, on the other hand can also act as an apparatus of good ethical motivation that can guide individuals in society/environment. Different religions might use different apparatus(s) to define the good code of ethics. This chapter shows similarities in the ethical teaching dictated by different holy books (mainly Islam, Judaism, and Christianity). The reason is to generalize that religion, as an apparatus of ethics, can be a factor toward ethical behavior supporting the man-made code of ethics in organizations which can also lead to support the definition of the proposed framework ethical behaviors.

Comparison between verses from holy books shows similarities in ethical dimension between religions (mainly Islam and Christianity). After showing the similarities, this chapter proposes a framework of ethical behaviors (FEB) to measure employees’ ethical standards in specific organization where technical environment like cloud computing was used as an example in this chapter.

Verses from both holy books (Quran and Bible–inclusive of the old testament) shows similarities in ethical standards. This similarity considered as a component toward the proposed framework for ethical behaviors in organizations where religion can be an important factor in multi-national, multi-cultural type of organizations. The proposed FEB can be used to identify possible environmental factors acting as moderators while religion and family values acting as mediators toward behaving ethically within technical environment.

The proposed framework can be used as a guide to identify ethical versus unethical employees where a mechanism to measure is proposed. Religious standard concluded out of the similarity section was used as a component of this framework.

The added value of utilizing good religious-based ethical standards is that employees/IT professionals will have an internal drive (on the top of corporate ethical standards) toward ethical behavior in such environment.

Postcommunist democratization opened many former communist societies to a freedom of religious expression that stimulates the birth of new forms of evangelism. Using the example of Poland, this chapter analyzes the forms of evangelism that became available and were most frequently practiced in democratizing Poland. It also investigates the results of evangelization in terms of change in the scope and degree of faith of Polish society, depicting changes in expressed religious practices.