Comparative Financial Systems in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: The Case of Interest
In today’s discussions the prohibition of interest, based in Shari’a law, is seen as solely an Islamic finance phenomenon and often advocated as a new way of providing financial services. It is important to recognise that the principles underpinning Shari’a are largely similar to those preached and practised by Judaism and Christianity as well as other religions. Both Judaism and Christianity have, for example, banned the receipt and payment of interest for a significant period of time, albeit that each had a slightly different interpretation on the permissibility of lending at interest. Although there is evidence about the existence of prohibitions on interest in other religions such as, for example, Buddhism, the focus of this paper is on the prohibition of interest in the three religions that are generally referred to as the Abrahamic or monotheistic faiths; Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the way in which the prohibitions entered into law and the impact on the availability of financial transactions that were executed despite the restrictions. The paper provides an insight into the way in which opinions regarding the permissibility of interest has changed over time.
Your money or your life : economy and religion in the Middle Ages
In this intriguing study, Jacques Le Goff, one of the most esteemed contemporary French historians of the Middle Ages, presents a concise investigation of the problem that usury posed for the medieval Church, which had long condemned the lending of money for interest. Le Goff describes how, as the structure of economic life inevitably began to include financial loans, the Church refashioned its theology in order to condemn the usurer not to hell but merely to purgatory.Jacques Le Goff is Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and the author of The Birth of Purgatory.Patricia Ranum is the translator of Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism by Fernand Braudel.
Treatment of sentence production deficits in aphasia: A linguistic-specific approach to wh-interrogative training and generalization
Abstract The present research examines the effects of a linguistic-specific treatment on acquisition and generalization of wh-interrogative structures in two aphasic subjects presenting with deficit patterns consistent with agrammatism. The underlying linguistic representation of sentence structures selected for treatment and generalization was considered based on aspects of Chomsky's (1981) Government Binding (GB) theory, and a linguistic-based, wh-movement treatment strategy was implemented. Using a single-subject multiple-baseline design across behaviours and subjects, the effects of treatment were explored by examining generalization patterns across wh question forms requiring wh-movement (movement of a direct object NP to COMP). Within question form generalization also was evaluated by examining formulation of untrained sentences of varied complexity—with complexity defined in terms of the number of phrasal nodes in the d-structure representation of sentences. Results indicated that for both subjects...