pickI don't really believe in passing judgment on classics™, but overall I really enjoyed reading this. I've read excerpts before, but never the whole thing, and Weber neatly ties together the early modern protestant thinkers' ideas with the economic circumstances of the world at the time, and how they formed the attitudes to labor and wealth we see today. Protestants be working.
Favourite tree, good book, lovely group chat on phone, nice weather, coffee
"are you still reading this?" you ask. Yes, yes I am, mainly because I was sick last weekend (negative for covid, fortunately, but still lackluster, and once I felt better I still didn't want to go anywhere for a while just to be safe.) And then the beginning of this week kicked my ass. But! A garden cafe near my house has socially distanced seating, so I was there for lunch today.
"Evidently, then, the orientation of religious needs to present emotional satisfaction could not develop so powerful a motive to rationalize worldly activity, as the need of the Calvinistic elect for proof with their exclusive preoccupation with the beyond. " she said, eating a croissant ?. Yes this could have been translated better.
Improving! Still under my favourite tree at Coffee Works. I have given up trying to find a highlighter that isn't abhorrent and am now underlining with the Hay pencil I had forgot I keep in my purse.
Books in German translated into English are always at least 25% unreadable, and this is somewhere in the middle of the 26-100% range. I don't really understand what makes it so difficult, I read German translated well into Swedish and just about any language into English. Anyway, otherwise I'm liking this so far. Still taking outside food into coffee works, as they still don't have any.
Bought hardcopy because ebook experience with library was terrible. Now balcony with Thai ice tea.
“It is true that the path of human destiny cannot but appal him who surveys a section of it. But he will do well to keep his small personal commentarie to himself... unless... called and gifted to give them expression in artistic or prophetic form. In most other cases, the voluminous talk about intuition does nothing but conceal a lack of perspective toward the object, which merits the same judgement as a similar lack of perspective toward men.”
Hobby: being irritated with the Seattle Public Library website, that claims I can read in epub format and then force me to open through overdrive anyway. Might as well use overdrive online then, fuck it.
Suddenly shocked myself by realizing that I never read this, which is crazy, but I basically have read so many summaries that I thought I had. Don't own a copy so we'll see what the library's ebook will do (last time I had to make browser-overdrive work so eeehh). I love the snarky lil quotation mark in the Penguin edition?!
Excited to dig into this classic for my religion class! We read a lot of biblical and early Christian texts on wealth and poverty, then we read the recently published book Evicted, and now we're trying to connect some dots! #nonfictionnovember
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism | 
