Daniel Vaca is the Robert Gale Noyes Assistant Professor of Humanities at Brown University, where he teaches in the Department of Religious Studies. A historian of religion and culture in North America, he specializes in the relationship between religious and economic activity in the United States. His first book, Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America (Harvard, 2019) examines how evangelical ideas, identities, and alliances have developed through commercial strategy and corporate initiative. The co-chair of the American Academy of Religion's program unit on Religion and Economy, Daniel serves on the editorial board of The Immanent Frame.
Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves; he was right about that, if about little else. And ascribing independent reality to what you have in fact made yourself is a perfect definition of what the Jewish and Christian Scriptures call idolatry.