This essay compares five different conceptions of the nature of work: capitalist, Christian, Buddhist, republican, and environmentalist. The capitalist perspective on the nature of work profoundly affects our common conceptions about the nature of work as well as our experiences with work. Nevertheless, there are also non-economic conceptions of the nature of work that are effective, influential, and contribute to a moral marketplace. The four non-economic traditions suggest ideals of what work ought to be, and ways through which one may transform the experience of work while living in a democratic capitalist culture. Further, the fact that the four different non-economic traditions can agree in characterizing work as a calling gives credence to the notion that an interdisciplinary and interfaith conception about the ideals of work can be attained.

This essay examines market morality from a sociological perspective. Focusing upon a case study of Poland, it highlights the effects historical socio-political forces have upon popular attitudes toward unequal accumulation. Poland's unique mythology of wealth is rooted in both peasant and literary subcultures, and the communist experience. Public opinion surveys demonstrate that negative attitudes toward wealth accumulation were pervasive in Poland during the early 1990s. Actual capital accumulation suggests that, in the early years of the post-communist transition, Polish reality largely substantiated Polish mythology. Political connections were often used to enter the Polish business elite, and shady practices employed to maintain such positions. The essay explores this correlation, highligjhting social mythology's joint dependence on cultural residue and reality, as well as the effects of social, political, and economic forces upon societal attitudes toward morality in the marketplace.

Attempts by Christian social theorists to harmonize Austrian liberalism and Christian tradition ignore serious contradictions in their respective moral systems. Friedrich Hayek's conception of the "spontaneous order" portends potentially harmful consequences for corporate religion by elevating the subjective individual as the singular source of value in human culture. Thus, Hayek's ideas on cultural evolution may provide insight into the perceived loss of moral voice among American religious institutions, Reinhold Niebuhr's economic realism is more conducive to exploring the moral persistence of liberal society recognizing the need for balance between subjective and collective expressions of the good. Key concepts in Niebuhr's economic thought are a unique value theory, a holistic conception of the individual and society, an understanding of the moral ambiguities associated with technological innovation, and recognition that balances of power are necessary to preserve social organicism and the Christian conception of personality.

Market capitalism requires absolute private property, and both institutions appeared at about the same time in history. The morality of the market rests on the morality of property, which may be argued both from Scripture and secular perspectives. Both approaches yield a theory of property that supports private ownership conditional on obligations to the community. Apparent contradictions in Scripture regarding property are resolved by this approach. Property ownership confers economic power on its holder. Modernity assumes that this power must be controlled by external forces-either by the market, or the state-but both limit freedom. True moral action must be free. The moral opportunity of the market is to avoid using economic power to exploit others, especially the weak and needy. Christian thought supplies the outline principles for moral guidance for ethical market action that revolve about self-restraint.

Discussions about economics and politics often generate more heat than light. What do the dictates of Scripture and insights from the field of political economy bring to the table? Of greatest importance, in a world of sinful people, economic markets have the ability to constrain immoral behavior by connecting moral behavior with financial and social reward. Yet, freedom still allows the possibility of unjust actions in economic markets. Thus, some potential role for government obtains. From there, the tension is between the Utopian desire for government to constrain justly and the practical realities of government in a fallen world. At the end of the day, the Christian cannot be fully content with either economic or political markets. They are left with the clear Biblical call to act with righteousness and justice in their own spheres of influence and the possibility of defending the rights of others through politics in the limited occasions when government policy is an ethical, appropriate, and practical means to godly ends.

The academy in the United States is almost wholly silent about Christianity, at least in the sense of providing Christian perspectives on the various fields. This silence about Christianity, and often real hostility toward it, ripples outward from the universities all the great institutions of society---the courts, media, entertainment industry, elementary and secondary schools---affecting all of society and culture. Silence or hostility at this great center of the life of the mind affects all else. To accept this silence in higher education is to surrender control of the institutions, mind, and spirit of the culture to those either indifferent or hostile to Christianity. Christians should break the silence by reaching out to other Christians both on campus and professionally, by establishing the whole apparatus of intellectual life, using the stress upon openness, pluralism, tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism to wedge open a place for a Christian voice, including existing professional organtations and forums, and developing organizational and legal strategies to protect that voice.

The culture wars must not be viewed as over, for if they are, the wrong side has won. That aspect of multiculturalism which has infected American colleges and universities known as "Feminism" has been especially insidious. Underlying its destructive force is its fundamental commitment to epistemological relativism. This essity offers an allegory to demonstrate the logical absurdity, intellectual paucity, and, ironically, ultimate sexist nature of contemporary academic feminism. The conclusion follows that traditional-minded academics need to take up the intellectual charge and challenge feminism on their own battlefields in what may be the last chance to win the culture wars and reapprorpiate feminism for the good of men and women everywhere.

Western culture abounds in New Age cults, which have grown dramatically in size and influence since the 1970s. New Age cults represent a crisis of cultural identity, a major dilemma of Western civilization at the end of the twentieth century. Such cults reflect and contribute to the disintegration of social institutions, ranging from turmoil in mainline religions, a weakening of business, legal, and political ethics, the tenuous role of science, and the failure of public educational institutions to create informed and independent minds. The New Age, with its multiple historical roots, also gauges a widespread desire for the recovery of a virtuous society, certainty about the material universe, spiritual meaning and a nurturing social and familial unity. The New Age has emerged as one path in that quest. Yet what is needed is the restoration of a culture of virtue.

According to many, the United States is embroiled in a culture war between religious conservatives, who believe in a transcendent moral authority, and religious liberals, who hold that moral truth is historically and contextually conditioned. Amidst this conflict is a cultural anomaly called the evangelical left, which blends conservative theology with liberal politics. An ethnographic study of an evangelical left congregation suggests that their social and political action is neither liberal nor progressive. Instead, this congregation has created a local culture that resists and remaps the traditional boundaries of the culture wars. This remapping centers on the concept of conventional relationships, which envelops every aspect of their fellowship, including theology and morality as well as social action. Yet the relational focus of this fellowship is not a new or unique cultural formation, but rather a rediscovery of traditional Christian social action.

Many people claim that they are relativists and proponents of tolerance. Yet relativism cannot foster tolerance in part because it is untenable as a coherent philosophy. There are at least three types of relativists---novice, generous, and radical. All three types demonstrate that even renowned scholars who hold to relativism are not tolerant, since a tolerant relativist is a contradiction in terms. Relativism is also theologically incoherent, since neutrality is impossible conceming truth claims. However, tolerance is essential for the social order to prosper. The ecumenical statement, "Evangelicals and Catholics Together," represents a model of tolerance in interreligious circles with clear promise for the rest of society. Since tolerance is founded on Biblical truths, the Church is responsible for promoting tolerance without sacrificing the truth. Once the Church deals with its own intolerance in a spirit of humility, it can become a catalyst in promoting tolerance to those of varied beliefs.

At the end of the second millennium, we seem to be somewhat nervous agairn. Twentieth-century scientific developments have opened up fascinating new fields of study both in the micro- and macrocosmos. Yet none of the new codes, paradigms, and ideologies appear to bring us nearer to some new and generally shared creed. Life without work for many, not only in the Third World, the successful integration of Europe, armed conflicts on local battlefields, as well as superficialities on TV screens, are our near-to-be contemporaneity. The seeming unlimited technical possibilities of artificial intelligence, the relativtatim of civic values, and a cartoon-like culture portend risks for the fiiture. Yet, while secular and lacking a binding sense of responsibility, postmodem society epitomizes spiritual hunger. Nurtured by good family traditions, the spiritual quest promises an open-ended, post-Godotian future.

Contrary to widespread relativism in the contemporary world, the idea of human rights argues for the existence of objective values. This idea rooted in the Christian tradition unifies, in a way, Anglo-American and Continental political philosophy. Under communism in Poland, the clearness of the idea of human rights established an important weapon in the hands of the Polish opposition. After the collapse of communism in 1989, the political elite in Poland was faced with the task of building a new structure for the state. However, embracing the idea of the welfare state as a main factor in the process of transition to democracy, Poland shares many dilemmas of the wealthy Westem countries, making the shift from communism much slower.

This essay offers hope that beyond the specter and tragedy of the Yugoslav civil war lie the prospects for peace, democratization, economic and political reconstruction, and the evolution of a democratic Third Yugoslavia. But, to realize this hope, there is a need for the development of a genuine civic culture and civil society in the Yugoslav successor states based on democratic values, pluralism, and tolerance, rooted in the conception of universal human rights, constitutionalism, and equality before the law. The South Slavs may have to retrieve their historical memory which predates the fateful divisions along ethnic, cultural, and religious lines. The Swiss model of autonomous cantons, four major languages, neutrality, but a pronounced common national identity is also instructive for democratic prospects of a possible future South Slav (con-) federation and peace in the Balkans, A proposed Illyrian Constitution would bind the South Slavs together, reconnecting individual human rights to community. Above all, moral and spiritual renewal are the necessary precondition for peace and reconciliation, as well as economic and political reconstruction and the genesis of a democratic Third Yugoslavia.

This field research report summarizes the results of interviews during special research trips to Daghestan from 1992-96. These interviews were conducted with both secular and religious leaders in villages, district centers, and the capital of Makhachkala. We found indigenous cultures, ethnic identities, and the entire North Caucasus region in transition from a Russian sphere of cultural and political influence to that of Islam, epitomized by a split cultural and generational identity of fathers versus sons. Yet indigenous cultures show great resilience toward both the former Soviet influences of atheism and modemization and the contemporary revival of Islam, which seeks to integrate all aspects of individual and community life. Curiously, just like the British Empire, the former imperial Soviet State evokes ambivalent feelings of nostalgia and admiration, mixed with apprehension, while Islam now appears as the major agent transformation of indigenous cultures toward a new geo-political identity.

Political culture theory enjoyed a revival during the 1980s despite its alleged inability to account for change, values, conflict, and differences within nations. A new school of thought attempts to remedy the shortfalls of Almond and Verba's The Civic Culture. The grid-group cultural theory, propounded by Thompson, Ellis and Wildavsky, proposes a typology of ways of life as the missing link in a cultural-functional analysis of the formation of preferences. This essay assesses cultural theory as a methodology and a substantive theory or sociology of knowledge. Cultural theory claims that there are only five possible ways of life: Hierarchy, egalitarianism, fatalism, individualism, and autonomy. Yet it fails to address questions of universal values, ethics, power, or human rights and freedoms. There are inherent problems in applying cultural theory as a mode of political analysis. In the absence of exogenous, non-systemic ethical criteria, cultural theory as a social construction of reality begs the question of ethical conduct.

For the past two decades, the humanistic disciplines have been dominated by poststructuralist theories and, more recently, a not unrelated curricular philosophy best defined as hardline multiculturalism, much discussed and often misunderstood. When linked together, they form an internal contradiction that is the moral challenge of liberal education today. Traditional political alignments cannot explain current divisions among the humanities professoriate. Ideological quarrels only obscure a deeper moral debate between an ascendant poststructuralism and a resurgent liberal humanism. It is important to reappropriate liberal humanism in an effort to revitalize humanistic inquiry and renew its place in creative public discourse, and check a danger posed by poststructuralism's fascination with power and epistemological relativism which threaten to erase the ethical border between education and indoctrination.

The thesis of this essay is that utopianism is an attempt to arrest the course of time, at a point where the Utopian manipulator finds it ripe for a radical transformation. So radical that Utopia will lack human features, personhood, family, reformable institutions, knowledge freely acquired, and art also freely created. The Utopian manipulator himself is the "intellectual" of modem times whose hatred of the human condition as it is---because God created it---is such that everything deserves to be destroyed. Afterwards, it would be rebuilt, but the foundation of reconstruction would be a different human nature.

This essay examines the political environment in Ireland during the nineteenth century and evaluates the impact of national patriotism upon the social landscape. In analyzing the changing topography of Victorian Ireland, religious ideology played a significant role in carving out the model of Irish culture at the close of the century. Thomas Moore's poetry reflects the cultural significance of both political and religious ideals by his use of imagery and language to unite these two social forces and represent them as thematic cooperatives essential to the identity and survival of Irish nationhood.

This article explores the often neglected impact on the American political system of Scottish Common Sense Realism and an Augustinian anthropology drawn from both this Scottish philosophy and the American culture's Puritan/Presbyterian roots. Such insights help us better understand the dynamics of the American system and its possible contribution as a paradigm or model for democratization in the communist world Significant differences between America and the communist world with respect to their distinct intellectual and cultural histories seem to preclude the applicability of the American system to post-communist nations in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Yet theological convergences among the prevailing religious traditions of these nations and America suggest that the Augustinian anthropological realism of the American system may have relevance to communist world cultures after all.

The dramatic fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is analyzed from such cultural theories and perspectives as Oswald Spengler, Pitirim Sorokin, Arnold Toynbee, Thorstein Veblen, and Alexis de Tocqueville. This approach is contrasted with the modem and postmodern approaches found in such works as Talcott Parsons, Francis Fukuyama, and Jean Baudrillard. The essay concludes that the dominant, boosterish view extant today, that Western democratic and free-market institutions can be transplanted onto Slavic culture, is unrealistic, and is itself a product of what Sorokin and Spengler called the "late" or autumnal phase of civilization.