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Biblical basis for work and business
Introduction to Hellen Keller
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Keller starts his book out with the fact that work was destined in the very beginning. It was something that God had done when he created the earth during the seven days of creation. God had worked to create the things on earth instead of simply willing it into existence. He had created everything and saw that it was good, which leads to Keller’s second point. Work is something that God views as good. Contrary to today’s society’s view on work as a necessary evil, work in the Bible from the beginning is viewed as good. It is as Keller says, “part of paradise,” (23) which is seen when God worked and cared for Adam in the Garden of Eden before the fall. He then proceeds on in the chapter stating that work is “foundational to our makeup” (24)
The Greeks viewed work as a necessary evil and, in fact, believed in non-attachment to the physical world. They promoted the idea of being uninvolved and un-invested in the world as much as possible and valued cognitive and non-physical work. While time has passed, the influence of Greeks is still prevalent in Western society as Keller points out. Though the focus of work is making money, the disdain of service or low paying jobs (janitor, gardener, and etc) compared to knowledge or high paying jobs (CEO, manager, and etc) is still apparent and common, Service jobs are viewed as lower status due to its low pay, thus it is deemed insulting and beneath one’s level. Despite society’s view, Keller states that there is dignity in all kinds of work because God sees all work as equal. There is no difference between “secular” work and “sacred “work; work was given to mankind by God. “Work has dignity because it is something that God does and because we do it in God’s place, as his
Jonathan Klemens’ definition of the Protestant work ethic found in his essay, “The Protestant Work Ethic: Just Another 'Urban Legend?'" pulls inspiration from Max Weber. Klemens’ takes the religious aspect out of Weber’s definition and transforms it from a three part definition to a four part definition. The first part of his definition is passion which is closely followed by commitment and hard work. The fourth and final aspect is innovation. According to Klemens these four parts are essential to a successful and efficient work ethic.
In Niall Ferguson’s essay “America’s Oh Sh*t Moment,” he mentioned America’s newfound unemployment work ethic. The statement was quite interesting to me because from my perspective, it is accurate because the majority of Americans do not want to work. They would much rather sit at home all day and watch television. Unfortunately, most can not sacrifice their jobs due to financial circumstances. Furthermore, I will use the idea of work ethic to write my paper by comparing America’s work ethic to India’s. Despite the fact that India is a third world country, most Indians have a stronger work ethic than Americans. Therefore, I will develop an argumentative synthesis to support my thesis based on the information I discover after I conduct thorough research.
This paper focuses mainly on the sincereity as well as the passion with which we do our job. Human body is a very sophisticated machine created by God himself. It can do all sorts of things but there are a few things at which the human body gets very perfect.And that perfectness comes from practice, devotion,love,sincerity and responsibility towards that particular thing. Let me associate the word "thing" in the previous sentence as working. Working for living. Reason I chose to write on this topic was that the Poem " Singapore" written by author Mary Oliver that I read in the book by John Schilb and John Clifford influenced me alot. The Poem narrates the life of a woman which works on an aeroplane and is cleaning teh restrooms which are very dirty. She visually and physically finds the job dirty. But while cleaning that restrooms she sees it in her own world.She finds her hands working in pleasure as she is wondering the scenes of rivers. She realises the truth of life that she has to work to earn her living.
Previous generations have a strong belief of keeping work and home life separate; that work is for work and home is for play (Rampell, 2011, para 21). Today’s professionals do not seem to abide by similar beliefs, constantly crossing the borders of one into the other. While many recognize this as an issue that could result in employees being less productive, it has actually resulted in them accepting that their work may run late into the evening or even into the weekend. I agree with this completely in that I grew up being taught that business is business and personal is personal; you leave your home life at the door. But now times have changed, and my weekends are no longer dedicated to my home life, but for work, because I attend classes during the week. Also, in my line of work in the Allied Health industry, it is a requirement to work off hours. Long gone are the days of working nine to five, Monday through Friday; technology and the demand of wanting affairs done and done as soon as possible, has made it so the “work week” is now 24-7. “Jon Della Volpe, the director of polling at Harvard Institute of Politics, said, ‘Some experts also believe that today’s young people are better at quickly switching from one task to another, given their exposure to so many stimuli during their childhood and adolescence’” (Rampbell,
In the essay “Work in an Industrial Society” by Erich Fromm, the author explains how work used to carry a profound satisfaction, however today workers only care about their payment for their labor. Fromm opens up with how craftsmanship was developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth century. It was not until the Middle ages, Renaissance and the eighteenth century, when craftsmanship was at its peak. According to C.W. Mills, workers were free to control his or her own working actions, learn from their work and develop their skills and capacities. Despite what Mills says, people today spend their best energy for seven to eight hours a day to produce “something”. Majority of the time, we do not see the final
The inability to achieve “work-life balance” has become a major focus for workplace equality activists. When this topic is brought about it is primarily used to describe how woman cannot have a work and home life but instead are forced to choose. Richard Dorment took on this point of interest from a different perspective in his article “Why Men Still Can’t Have It All” published with esquire. Going against the normal trend he describes how women are not the only ones put into the same sacrificial situations, but instead that men and women alike struggle to balance work and home. Dorment opens up by saying “And the truth is as shocking as it is obvious: No one can have it all.” In doing so Richard Dorment throws out the notion that one
In Miya Tokumitsu’s article “In the Name of Love,” she expresses the notion of how doing what you love in the line of work is selfish, and is a form of distraction for the actual work at hand. She derives that an issue of DWYL is that it is based around the idea of thinking only about oneself, instead of those around them. She explains that there are two sides to this issue, and that people tend to forget the side of people that are forced to work low-end jobs just to suffice enough money for their families to survive. A major points she includes is how DWYL distinguishes class lines, and she draws attention to the features that make up both. She also contradicts the typical idea of passion and the order that it follows, by saying how it is
In “Scrubbing in Maine”by Barbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich decides to work at the Maids Franchise so she can observe how the system was made for the maids. During her time being a maid she became emotionally impacted by the way her and the women were treated. Ehrenreich experiences in the article”Scrubbing in Maine,’’are the ones I can relate to even though both jobs don’t seem the same, the fact is my time spent working at Jewel is remarkably and depressingly similar to the time spent by Ehrenreich as a maid. In both instances employees are not really human, but are parts of a bigger machine and only Blue collar workers are stereotypes as uneducated unthinking individuals. As Blue collar jobs emphasized the routines, dehumanization of the employee, and loss of control over a person’s time. Workers do not engage in cognitive skills, but physical
...e persuasive and understandable. The most important lesson I learned in this article was to appreciate those people who provide services to us. They are work at poor conditions and are forced to work as a nonstop machine to fight for their daily living. According to work perspective, for majority of the time we do not stand out for others despite their innocence, “So why didn’t I intervene”? (275). we would just remain silent in order to keep our jobs. In this essay, Ehrenreich recounts how she felt guilty for not standing up for George when he was accused of stealing goods. This feeling of inability is common in low-income people, not well-educated workers limits their opportunities to find better jobs.
Throughout her chapter, Ehrenreich maintains a degrading tone on low income workers. She explains how "Work is what you do for others."
... The slave has its negativity and being-for-self within it; it makes death become powerful in the depths of its being, checking its instinctual desires, and giving an objective 'mirror' of its true self in the objective shape of the thing produced, only in and through its work. Ultimately, work itself has proven to be the appropriation of death, and thereby a transformation of it into the objective recognition of self-consciousness as being all reality. Indeed, the natural finitude of man constitutes the dialectical possibility of man's freedom from slavish nature in and through his work, and the latter is likewise the means by which Life as self-conscious redeems itself from its own slavish 'in-itself'. On a broader scale, work, which takes place in the consciousness of death, is truly the work of Spirit freeing itself up from its frozen state in nature.
Coal mining, for example, is hard work, but it is necessary—we must have coal. Working in the sewers is unpleasant, but somebody must work in the sewers. And similarly with a plongeur ’s work. Some people must feed in restaurants, and so other people must swab dishes for eighty hours a week. It is the work of civilization, therefore unquestionable. This point is worth considering. Is a plongeur ’s work really necessary to civilization? We have a feeling that it must be ‘honest’ work, because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish of manual work. We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a social need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be cutting down
She believes that the refusal of work promotes anti-productivism, which “allows us to see work as a form of violence, rather than a path to self-discovery or a necessary service to the community” (164). In opposition to Weeks, Berg deems that the refusal of work is a radical way of attempting to accomplish Wages for Housework. Furthermore, she supports this argument by saying that capital binds its workers to the job because it “binds workers to absorb the costs of the risks” (169). These risks are often associated with financials, social expectations, etc which can then interfere with future generations. For example, teachers who are protesting for better pay are often bothered by the thought of the social repercussions of their actions, especially if it can be harmful to their future. These “social repercussions” are defined as “blackmail” or “social necessity debt”because the necessity of their work will contribute to the reproduction of society (163). In Berg 's analysis, continuing this wave of feminism reveal the complexities that is rather hard to make final decisions for because of the many emotional ties and moral obligations associated with capitalism, laborers, and their
Probably no other pronouncement on the social question has had so many readers or exercised such a wide influence. It has inspired a vast Catholic social literature, while many non-Catholics have acclaimed it as one of the most definite and reasonable productions ever written on the subject. Sometimes criticized as vague, it is as specific as any document could be written for several countries in different stages of industrial development. On one point it is strikingly definite: "Let it be taken for granted that workman and employer should, as a rule, make free agreements, and in particular should agree freely as to wages; nevertheless, there is a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, that remuneration should be sufficient to maintain the wage-earner in reasonable and frugal comfort. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice.
He did not consider studying and readins as being “work”. He states: “Men like to work`.” (Lodge 126)