This paper argues that the alleged demise of liberation theology is the product of an oversimplification of the movement’s development,—one that depends on a church-focused understanding of the process of secularization. Yet, a different interpretation of this process may allow us to see secularization as a process capable of eliciting new forms of sacralization. My contention is that liberation theology has remained active in civil society, especially through faith-based organizations not supported by the Catholic Church. I argue that these civil-society organizations have become new sacred spaces that address the needs of the most vulnerable. To warrant these claims, I present a comparative study of the parallel development of liberation theology and Pentecostalism in Latin America, particularly in the case of Peru. Since both movements focus on the most disenfranchised and thus may compete for the same public, attention to the success or failure of their strategies will help to elucidate the current status of liberation theology.

The economic discipline plays a performative role in constructing the moral order of market society. Yet, little attention has been paid to what economists explicitly regard as moral or how they conceive of morality. This article reflects a recent attempt to put morals into economics, that is, to introduce morality as a research topic in behavioural and experimental economics. It maps three research programs that theorize the moral economy. The programs emphasize the moral foundations of market society, the moral limits of market expansion, and the moral consequences of market trading and, thus, appear irreconcilable with classifications of economists as market enthusiasts or moral agnostics. At the same time, however, the literature centres on an “economized” form of morality that is corrective to market inefficiencies, attributed to the responsibility of the individual, and expressed in rational terms. In doing so, this literature contributes to redefining moral problems in economic terms.

This study introduces the concept of micro-segregation as an alternative to ghettoization in order to understand residential patterns in historical Jewish communities. The process of ghetto formation is associated with the spatial separation of a minority group as a result of racial stigma and poverty. It operates at a large scale and posits that ghetto boundaries will be rigidly policed. By contrast, the process of micro-segregation is associated with the separation of a minority group as a result of marginalized legal status. It operates at a smaller scale and posits that the boundaries of ethnic communities are porous, offering sites of economic value. To assess the conceptual utility of micro-segregation, we apply it to four Jewish communities in the German states before the 20th century. Spatial analysis suggests that the communities varied in their degree of micro-segregation, but consistently offered economic opportunity at the boundaries of Christian and Jewish worlds.

States require money to function and therefore every government has to continuously raise new funds. On the financial markets, governments cannot be sure that auctions of their debt will be sufficiently attractive to financial investors, which is why they usually enter into cooperative agreements with selected banks. The best known and most widespread form of cooperation is the primary dealer system. A primary dealer is a bank that commits to purchasing a certain percentage of government debt at each auction and to intervene as a formalized market maker in the debt market if necessary. Most of the primary dealer systems involve the banks being financially neither remunerated nor compensated for their activities, and if there is some kind of financial compensation, it is on a low level. The article analyses European primary dealer systems and asks why banks are willing to participate in these systems. I will show that both domestic and foreign banks use their status as primary dealers to build long-term relationships with one or more European governments and to gain an advantage on the global stage. In Bourdieu’s terms, primary dealer banks use their financial capital to accumulate social and symbolic capital.

This article provides the conclusions of a study of wars which are relatively well-documented through the ages and across the continents of human settlement. The evidence on which these conclusions are based is to be found in my book On Wars published by Yale University Press in July 2023. There are two main conclusions. First, the initial decisions to make either war or peace have almost always been made by a small handful of rulers and their advisors, regardless of whether they inhabit autocratic or representative political systems. They are to blame for war, not the peoples. Second, wars are rarely rational in either means or ends. They are rarely carefully calculated and they rarely bring the the desired ends, with the exceptions of where big powers aggress against small ones, “sharks swallowing minnows”, and of wars fought in self-defense where there is a reasonable chance of success. This is because in addition to the element of rational calculation so stressed by Realist theory, rulers and their advisors are substantially driven by combinations of emotions and ideologies.