Minnesota Sunday

Church steeples rise above the rich brown of wealthy ground

      All the corn is gone on the Milwaukee Hopper

Raise the golden ears to listen to Sunday praises
     And send it to the produce pews of the world.

Sing Preston, Minnesota hymns to the Sunday
    Twilight drive through green and spring gold bar
Melodies and dairy songs as we ride
    To Harmony in glory near silos and steeples.

Minarets call protestant believers, silhouetted in evening prayer,
    To share their share, as ushers pass baskets,
Pew to pew, hand to hand
    Against the cloud-streaked skyline.

Passing a low place by a stream, Max Weber’s
     Shadowy figure can faintly be seen
     Walking among the trees.

                                          -         C. S. Cholas, May 5, 1974.

Maximilian Karl Emil Weber (21 April 1864 – 14 June 1920) was a German sociologist, historian, jurist, and political economist, who is regarded as among the most important theorists of the development of modern Western society.
Understanding the genesis of capitalism (in contrast to Marx's historical materialism).[i] Weber would first elaborate his theory in his seminal work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), where he attributed ascetic Protestantism as one of the major "elective affinities" involved in the rise of market-driven capitalism and the rational-legal nation-state in the Western world.[20] Arguing the boosting of capitalism as a basic tenet of Protestantism, Weber suggested that the spirit of capitalism is inherent in Protestant religious values.[20] Protestant Ethic would form the earliest part in Weber's broader investigations into world religion, as he later examined the religions of China and India, as well as ancient Judaism, with particular regard to their differing economic consequences and conditions of social stratification. In another major work, "Politics as a Vocation", Weber defined "the state" as an entity that successfully claims a "monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory".[21] He would also be the first to categorise social authority into distinct forms: charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal. Among these categories, Weber's analysis of bureaucracy emphasized that modern state institutions are increasingly based on the latter (rational-legal authority).

After contracting Spanish flu, he died of pneumonia in 1920, aged 56. Wikipedia