Religious motivations for work ethics. The american case

Abstract

From Initial Remarks: "At first glance, everything is obvious. Work after all belongs to the specific forms of human activity towards which no contemporary religion remains indifferent. Yet the question begins to become complicated once the questions being asked are finetuned: for example, 1) whether all religions have the same attitude to work, and, if not, 2) whether their different understanding of work implies onto the mundane plane an uneven development of a human civilisation, both in its material sense and that of the realm of symbolic culture, and also 3) remains in direct connection with the eschatological visions proper for the given religion (concerning e.g. the dependence of the posthumous fate of the human on his or her behaviour in the earthly life). Providing convincing answers to these seemingly simple questions is not easy, especially in societies that in the successive phases of their historical development have changed not only their ethnic and racial but also their denominational mix, moving from stable, homogenous states to dynamic heterogeneous structures. Undoubtedly, one such society is the totality of citizens of the United States of America. Here is the simplest of all possible proofs."(...)