Sophia or Clio?
No sooner did I start attending church again than a schism occurred. I can't take the credit for this. I can view it as a historical dynamic, however. The UMC is itself an offshoot of the Anglican church, as was Puritanism. These two denominations are diametrically opposed. Sometimes the spirit that moves congregations is Clio, not Sophia. The Puritans were Grim Pills with fascist tendencies; the Methodists eventually started the anti-slavery movement in England, which also put them at odds with the Cavaliers who had transplanted this peculiar institution to North America. My first acquaintance with cliodynamics was when I read a critique of this discipline when it asserted that slavery made economic sense. The discipline of cliodynamics was proposed by Peter Turchin in 2003. Cliodynamics is a transdisciplinary area of research that integrates cultural evolution, economic history, macrosociology, the mathematical modeling of historical processes, and the construction and analysis o...