According to Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, a scholar of Orthodoxy who teaches at Northeastern University, in Boston, the new converts tend to be right-wing and Russophile, and some speak freely of their admiration for Putin’s “kingly” role. In the U.S., converts are concentrated in the South and Midwest, and some have become ardent online evangelists for the idea that “Dixie,” with its beleaguered patriarchal traditions, is a natural home for Russian Orthodoxy. Some of them adorn their websites with a mash-up of Confederate nostalgia and icons of Russian saints.

An alternative kind of note-taking was encouraged in the late Middle Agesamong members of new lay spiritual movements, such as the Brethren of theCommon Life (fl. 1380s–1500s). Their rapiaria combined personal notes andspiritual reflections with readings copied from devotional texts.

we found this extraordinary paper from 1951 I think by Goldschmidt Walter Goldschmidt which nobody's read it has 00:29:14 got a very strange title something like a contribution to ethical and philosophical sociology or something which tells you very little about its content but it's about these Californian foragers who live next door to the 00:29:27 highly aristocratic slave keeping fishermen of the northwest coast and what Goldschmidt who was a student of Alfred Kroeber I believe the great sort of Dayan of 00:29:40 California anthropology what he argues there point four point is that these Californian hunter-gatherers actually had a kind of work ethic which is remarkably similar to what Max Weber 00:29:54 classically described as the Protestant work ethic of central and northern Europe

Discussion is led by an instructor, but the instructor’s job is not to give the students a more informed understanding of the texts, or to train them in methods of interpretation, which is what would happen in a typical literature- or philosophy-department course. The instructor’s job is to help the students relate the texts to their own lives.

Moss shows how Protestant pedagogues such as Johann Sturm at Strasbourg used commonplace books in the schoolroo

Though he doesnot discuss mnemonics, Thomas Sloane similarly argues that classical invention—a process thattakes not only logic but also“sense, imagination, and emotions”into consideration—is irreparablyneutered by Ramism (137).

an isolated population with unique selective pressures resulting in evolutionary divergence from the mainland population

The result is that the readers of major news outlets are presented with an unrealistically benign picture of a darkly authoritarian, cult-like branch of Protestantism. That’s one reason I’m writing this essay.

A second strand in the development of the American prosperity gospel was the valorization of the “Protestant work ethic.” Written in 1905, Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism traced what he saw as the specifically Protestant approach to labor as integral to the development of capitalism and industrialization. In Weber’s historical analysis, Protestant Calvinists — who generally believe in the idea of “predestination,” or that God has chosen some people to be saved and others damned — felt the need to justify their own sense of themselves as the saved. They looked both for outward signs of God’s favor (i.e., through material success) and for ways to express inward virtue (i.e., through hard work). While the accuracy of Weber’s analysis is still debated by scholars, it nevertheless tells us a lot about cultural attitudes at the time Weber wrote it.

According to a recent Dutch study, that point of view still holds true today: Protestants and citizens of predominately Protestant countries tend to conflate labor with personal satisfaction more than those of other religious traditions.

If Henrich’s history of Christianity and the West feels rushed and at times derivative—he acknowledges his debt to Max Weber—that’s because he’s in a hurry to explain Western psychology.

"Protestant" life of wealth and risk over the "Catholic" path of poverty and security.[8]