St. Maximos' Hut

Once again, early morning meandering along the internet by-ways has resulted in an unexpected stop. "The Economic in Religion and the Religious in Economics: A Qur'anic-Weberian Perspective" by Basit Koshul of Concordia College affords some useful insights into our favorite topic from the Islamic perspective. Happily, Koshul's piece avoids the customary focus on poverty and debt-release, but, mainly addresses a particular Scripture (the Qur'an) to "demonstrate that there is an irreducible presence of the economic in religion." The paper also briefly examines "a particular corpus within social science [to]show the inadequacy of the attitude of the academy by demonstrating the irreducible presence of the religious in economics from the perspective of Max Weber's social science." Koshul's paper winds up with "with some remarks on the relevance (and perhaps necessity) of an investigation of the economic from a religious perspective—and vice versa—in the contemporary cultural milieu." It is available at The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning, No. 5.2 (Aug. 2005).