The theory of the firm is employed to explain behaviour of the church. Churches produce a set of products including entertainment, a variety of socially valuable public goods, eternal life and alteration of otherwise fated events. Most importantly, it reduces transactions costs by enforcing a...

Social enterprises are organisations seeking business solutions to social problems. This e-book looks at social enterprises around the world in terms of governance, corporate social responsibility, entrepreneurship, sustainability and in the public sector

Over the past century explicit discussion of theology has all but disappeared from economic discourse, while economics has been largely ignored by theologians. This paper argues that this separation is neither desirable nor possible, and calls for a theological economics. The argument is in two...

This paper traces the evolution of (Catholic) church‐state relations from Nicaraguan independence through to 1998, showing how a symbiotic relationship has emerged whereby one makes recourse to the other in order to justify its existence and provide it with moral authority. This relationship,...

This comment is a constructive criticism of Professor John C. O’Brien’s interesting and provocative article: “Freud’s civilization revisited in the nuclear age.” It is my conviction that both Freud and O’Brien underestimate the power of Christianity in the creation and in the defense...

The title is intentionally facetious, rhetorical and to be taken cum grano salis. For certain ones prone to confusing fact with fancy, the events in the USSR of 1989 and the appearance of John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus on the heels thereof respectively sounded the death‐knell for Marx’s...

This article examines the essence of the New Age movement: its reservations about the Judaic‐Christian heritage, its pantheistic/monistic orientation, its individualism, its search for the mystical experience, its skepticism of modern science and technology, its openness to androgyny, its...

Saint Antonino was an early economist and social scientist who addressed the need to design theories of production, value and distribution, in part becuase he saw the interconnectedness of individual elements. The system he discussed is more general than narrowly economic, embracing as it does...

Understanding the differences in the Islamic and Christian view of interest requires coming to terms not with the acts constitutive of the practice but the meaning of the practice in two different views of what an economy produces and delivers. The difference in the norms that govern interest...

A microenterprise is modeled on Islamic epistemological premises to bring out its extensively applied perspectives using community‐based participatory instruments of Islamic law (Shari’ah ). The case study is for Bangladesh, but the model developed has universal implications. Various...