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An examination of the moral demands that training programs in personal sales impose on sales personnel, the tensions these demands produce in the work world of the salesperson, & the ways the personal sales industry & sales personnel themselves respond to these tensions, based on analysis of training materials produced in the US by the Life Insurance Marketing & Research Assoc & other documentary & interview data collected in 1987 & 1989 from life insurance sales agents in NY & Pa. It is argued that the life insurance industry expects its agents to endeavor to act as if they were professionals & prove their professionalism to the prospect. The industry responds to the discrepancies between the ideal of professional service inculcated in training programs & the realities encountered by the sales force in the field by means of three strategies: a philosophy of financial security that enables the agent to endure the psychic stress & metaphysical emptiness of life in personal sales; sales conventions, which are carefully staged productions designed by the industry as rituals of recognition that celebrate the virtues of the service ideal, reinforce a commitment to its principles, & reward agents who measure up to its requirements; & a sales force ethic of toughness, imperturbability, & nonchalance that endows agents with the iron-clad defenses & hardened sensibilities required to act with poise & affability in the face of insult & humiliation. Modified AA

In this wide-ranging collection of essays, the author explores the politically subversive and nonviolent anarchist dimensions of Christian discipleship in response to dilemmas of power, suffering, and war. Essays engage texts and thinkers from Homer's Iliad, the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament to portraits of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Noam Chomsky, and Elie Wiesel. This book also analyzes the Allied bombing of civilians in World War II, the peculiar contribution of the Seventh-day Adventist apocalyptic imagination to Christian social ethics, and the role of deceptive language in the Vietnam War. From these and other diverse angles, Osborn builds the case for a more prophetic witness in the face of the violence of the "principalities and powers" in the modern world. This book will serve as an indispensible primer in the political theology of the Adventist tradition, as well as a significant contribution to radical Christian thought in biblical, historical, and literary perspectives. - Publisher info

Argues that Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri's Empire (2000) may be "good to think" rather than "good to eat." The book is deemed compelling because it is homologous to certain tactical interventions in various social fields. Discussion centers on a double homology between Empire & multitude & between Empire's homologous form & contemporary money & finance, which looks to Claude Levi-Strauss's insistence on the integration of essence & form & the union of method & reality. Looking at Empire & finance capital in terms of theodicy, concerned with divine justice, sheds light on this double homology. Hardt & Negri's two modernities emphasizing God's transcendence vs God's immanence can be contrasted by turning to Augustine & Spinoza, from whom the two authors take inspiration. It is asserted that Empire is theodicy that rotates around the shift from "plenitude" to multitude & power reconfiguration. Hardt & Negri see the multitude, by virtue of a enervating utopianism, as the locus of the capitalist market. An examination of Islamic banking & tax evasion illustrates the practical & theoretical limits of Empire's laterality by exemplifying the reality that "God is immanent to the design, & a transcendental abstract justice is seen to reside in & be marked to the divine market." Regarding the Enron & similar scandals, the particular temporality of "mark-to-market" accounting is pointed up, & it is contended that if Hardt & Negri are right about the Empire-multitude homology, then Islamic bankers & tax evaders who exist in the crisis of market theodicy are also correct. Further, the homology between Empire & other social phenomena require attention to the tools of analysis because Empire & these phenomena operate in terms of an ontological complicity, forming a nomological machine (Nancy Cartwright, 1999). The sand dollar's homological relation to Christian myth is taken up as way to illuminate some ideas on the interrelationship between theodicy & morphology & to bring home the conclusion that Empire while good to think is not good to eat. J. Zendejas