Max Weber thought that was peculiarly Protestant.

He's evangelical about it. He brings his cousins in now.

And today we have a kind of evangelical pessimism all around us.

But it so happened he was speaking in a Protestant Church.

So, I spent time with evangelical Christians, and Hasidic Jews, and the Amish.

In 1807, Robert Morrison, the first British Protestant missionary to China arrived in Guangzhou.

We know this because today the work ethic is no longer a Protestant, Western phenomenon.

We saw scientific revolutions, the Protestant Reformation, constitutional democracies possible where they had not been possible before.

Uzbekistan's system of religious education includes the Tashkent Islamic Institute, 10 madrassas and Orthodox and Protestant seminaries.

The Protestant International Church in Islamabad, for instance, is one of the best protected buildings in Pakistan.

December saw the Evangelical Lutheran community of Uzbekistan celebrate its centenary as the only Lutheran Church in Central Asia.

Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions are the only denominations that benefit from confessional education in the school system.

Membership of the Council includes the leaders of the Muslim Board of Uzbekistan, the Tashkent and Central Asian eparchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Union of Christian Evangelical Baptist Churches, the Full Gospel Church Centre, the Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Tashkent Jewish community.

And we thought, sustainability has grown into being this sort of neo Protestant idea that it has to hurt in order to do good.

The private system includes two business colleges, five high schools and several elementary schools, most of which are affiliated with Roman Catholic and Protestant religious denominations.

When you are brought up as a Catholic, you think that if you ever set foot in a Protestant Church, you'll be struck dead at the threshold.

Most examples of violent crime by mentally ill people were committed first in England, and then in the US, often seeming politically motivated, even when mediated by religion. The first such case was likely that of Peter Berchet, a young Protestant, who felt that he had to kill the royal councilor Christopher Hatton, also a Protestant, whom Berchet believed to be a Catholic sympathizer.

We're seeing an entente cordiale between science and religion that five years ago I would not have believed, as the evangelical community has understood the desperate situation of global warming.

In the US, especially, the borderlines between showbiz and politics (or indeed religion) have always been porous. The similarities between the variety show, the evangelical meeting, and the party convention are striking.

They define their religion as moderate and liberal, with many upholding gay rights and abortion, both anathema to evangelical Christians. The majority of American Jews even support the creation of a Palestinian state.

Representatives of different religions, sports and sports sciences from approximately 20 countries attended the event at the invitation of the Evangelical Academy Bad Boll and the International Council of Sport Science and Physical Education.

After all, Pope Francis s native region, Latin America, is currently home to nearly half (44 ) of the world s Catholics. But the Catholic Church is increasingly losing out to Protestant competition there and elsewhere.

Pull one thread the celibacy requirement for priests, for example and the whole edifice comes crashing down. Consider what has happened to liberalizing Protestant denominations, which, for all their good intentions, have lost adherents.

But it was interesting because I had some very preconceived notions about, for instance, evangelical Christianity, and I found that it's such a wide and varied movement that it is difficult to make generalizations about it.

Starting in the autumn of 2008, a single program of ethics and religious culture will be offered to all pupils at the primary and secondary levels, replacing the current Roman Catholic, Protestant and moral education programs.

AIPAC represents a striking anomaly in the life of American Jews. It is increasingly identified with the Republican agenda and Israel s evangelical Christian supporters, even though polls have repeatedly shown that Jews are America s most liberal ethnic group.

Instead of giving in to grief, depression, defeat in the face of that violence, Mairead hooked up with Betty a staunch Protestant and a staunch Catholic and they took to the streets to say, No more violence.

Seventy three per cent of Nicaragua's population is Catholic, 15.1 per cent is Evangelical and 1.5 per cent is Moravian. Two per cent of the population belongs to other faiths and 8.4 per cent does not practise any religion.

Instead, the emphasis is on protecting the nation against foreign viruses. These views are promoted not only by politicians, but also by leading religious authorities, including the evangelical right in the US, Catholic prelates in Eastern Europe, and Israel s nationalist rabbis.

Article 2 of the Norwegian Constitution states that the Evangelical Lutheran Church is the official state religion, and further determines that those of the inhabitants, who subscribe to this have an obligation to bring up their children in the same manner .

The new Education Act's 2 (4) stipulates that education provided in the CKREE subject shall be based on the schools' Christian object clause and provide thorough knowledge of the Bible and Christianity as a cultural heritage and Evangelical Lutheran Faith .

I was in Ireland during the Troubles, 10 years ago, and I was working with some Catholic and Protestant kids on conflict resolution. And I did this with them a risky thing to do, because they were street kids.

When it comes to the so called Israel lobby in Washington, which is well organized and very well funded, evangelical Christians play an important part as well. But they vote overwhelmingly for Republicans, so Obama would not seem to have much to lose there.

They depended much less on foreign creditors than on domestic lenders. The Dutch model was exported to Britain in 1688, along with the political revolution that deposed the Catholic James II and put the Dutch Protestant William of Orange on the English throne.

Alas for them, however, the Flemish have no such desire. Belgium, after all, became an independent state in 1830, precisely in order to liberate the Catholic Flemish, as well as the Walloons, from being second class subjects in a Protestant Dutch monarchy.

It was standard pre modern practice to overcome such differences with a formal disputation. In the early sixteenth century, the German princes attempted to settle the philosophical challenge presented by Protestant reformers by engaging Martin Luther to debate a prominent orthodox Catholic theologian, Johannes Eck.

The British economist Walter Bagehot replied at the time that there would probably be two competing world currencies, which he termed Latin and Teutonic. By Teutonic, Bagehot seemed to mean the Protestant world the United States, recovering from the Civil War, Germany, and Britain.

The modern tendency to regard economic differences in terms of religion was stimulated by Max Weber s reflections on the Protestant work ethic. But that interpretation is clearly unsatisfactory, and cannot account for the dynamism of the deeply Catholic world of Renaissance Italy and Flanders.

Governments have always worried about the flow and control of information, and our age is hardly the first to be strongly affected by dramatic changes in information technology. Gutenberg s printing press was important to the origins of the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing wars in Europe.

Consider Ireland, where for many years Catholics objected that if a vote were held within Northern Ireland, the two thirds Protestant majority would rule. Protestants replied that if a vote were held within the geographical area of the entire island, the two thirds Catholic majority would rule.

Gaelic is spoken by only about 80,000 of Scotland s 5.1 million inhabitants. Nor does religion play a discernible role while Roman Catholics used to fear independence as being liable to result in Protestant hegemony, today Catholics and Protestants are roughly equal in their support of Scotland s institutions.

Pope Benedict, being from Germany, a predominantly Protestant country, does not carry the weight of this bitter history. Perhaps this is one reason why Alexi responded positively to Benedict s first speech urging reconciliation, saying that he hopes that this will improve Orthodox Catholic relations on the post Soviet territory.

Indeed, even Bush s own political base, the Christian fundamentalists, are becoming green, pressuring the administration to sign the Kyoto Protocol because they believe that the environment must be protected just like unborn life. Eco theology and evangelical pro life propaganda have become one of the liveliest branches of the US environmental movement.

It was as natural for an Elizabethan Protestant to see the cause of his mental discomfort in a government overrun by Catholic sympathizers as it is for someone with a Muslim connection in the US today to see this cause in America as the embodiment of Western offenses against the faith.

America's subsequent patronage of Israel had less to do with evangelical passion for the Holy Land, or a spontaneous love for the Jewish people, than with the Cold War. But over time, especially in conservative political discourse, criticism of Israel increasingly came to be regarded as not just anti Semitic but also anti American.