Corporate Spirit

Porterfield's book is readable in the best sense of the word. Given its impressive scope, it necessarily skims over a number of historical themes. However, her prose is judicious and her conclusions are reasoned and measured. This is an exceptional book. * Prof Thomas E. Simmons, University of South Dakota, IJRF *
Religion and the Rise of the Modern Corporation... deserves a wide reading. * Chris Steed, Theology *
Surveying vast historical and historiographical terrain, Porterfield's work contributes especially to recent scholarship that has used the study of religion as a method of identifying and illuminating the central concepts and convictions that animate seemingly secular areas of social life, including economy and law. In Porterfield's hands, economic history is religious history. This approach makes the book ideal for courses designed to unsettle traditional schemes of social categorization and historical periodization. * Church History *
Amanda Porterfield has produced a masterful, accessible, tightlywoven macrohistory of religious in?uences upon corporate cultures and structures from ancient Rome to the presidency of Donald Trump. * Jill K. Gill, Journal Of Ecclesiastical History *
Porterfield is pointing readers to new scholarly territory. As a religion scholar, she brings a fresh perspective to the historical study of economics and religion ... Porterfield points in important new directions to which scholars coming from other disciplines may be blind. This is a refreshing development. * Donald E. Frey, EH.Net *
Porterfield neither glorifies nor condemns corporations; instead, she deftly situates them in the mainstream of Western and American ideas and practices. * Susan Curtis, Journal of American History *
Porterfield has produced a landmark work on the messy entanglement of Western Christianity and the corporate form. It raises important new questions, reveals new patterns of change and continuity, and should alter the ways we talk about religion and capitalism... Corporate Spirit demonstrates that marking corporations 'secular' and religion 'private' distorts more than it reveals. The book's institutional focus imposes a healthy concreteness on a field of inquiry that too often leans on metaphors. If this book gets the attention it deserves, historians of religion will be spending less time chasing what adherents felt and thought and believed, and more time in the corporate documents. * Timothy E W Gloege, Reading Religion *
This learned and wide-ranging book on the varied and intimate connections between Christianity and American capitalism is absolutely fascinating. Amanda Porterfield chronicles their relationship from the Roman Empire to yesterday. In doing so, she has achieved an unusual combination of admirable traits: she is both original and judicious. * Daniel Walker Howe, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 *
This fascinating new study explores the overlapping terrain of Christianity and contract law from Roman antiquity to the twenty-first century world of Enron and global corporations. In bringing together the Pauline idea of 'corporate membership' with the evolving world of corporate America it has no equal in breadth of scholarship, grace of style, or acuity of interpretation. Nothing less than a scholarly tour de force. * Harry S. Stout, author of American Aristocrats: A Family, a Fortune, and the Making of American Capitalism *
Amanda Porterfield's Corporate Spirit is not simply a description, or even a critique, of contemporary American capitalism; it is an exciting synthesis thinking about what makes for collective action and shared community, from the ancient world to the present. It is now essential reading for understanding Christian ethics, civil religion, and American exceptionalism. * G. Scott Davis, Booker Professor of Religion and Ethics, University of Richmond *