Jacob Neusner

Religion and Economics: New Perspectives Jacob Neusner

This collection of papers on a common theme forms another step in the joint editors' long-term program of tightening the bonds between the study of religion and the social sciences. Scholars of texts require the perspective and the rigor, in interpreting those texts as religious documents, of social science, and scholars of social science, with their acutely contemporary focus, need the long view afforded by ancient texts and religious cultures accessible only or mainly in writing. And both kinds of scholarship (the humanistic, historical and textual and intangible, the social scientific, contemporary, concrete and quantified) bear heavily upon theological learning, systematic, philosophical inquiry into the data of religion, an intellectual discipline today neglected in the academy, but, in times past as much as in times that are coming, rich in promise for a full understanding of religion as a coherent system of intellect and culture.