This article argues that thinking about entrepreneurship as a potential instrument for relief from endemic poverty and disadvantage, especially among the Indigenous, has all too often been captive to a concept of entrepreneurship that is built out of constrained economic and cultural assumptions. The authors develop this argument from a critical discussion of contributions by Karl Polanyi and Robert Heilbroner. The result is that approaches to venture have been encouraged that are sometimes a poor fit for the circumstances of those (...) they are meant to benefit, and other forms that could have considerable promise have gone unexplored. This article outlines some features of Indigenous culture and build on the analysis of David Harper to construct an improved notion of entrepreneurship that allows for these distinctive features. The article concludes that research and policy making concerning entrepreneurship as an instrument of development among the Indigenous need to be undertaken with this reconstructed understanding of entrepreneurship that is a better fit for the realities of Indigenous culture. (shrink)

Bad things happen; and not just to bad people, but with apparent indifference to the moral or other qualities of the victims. For the theist who believes that the world is created and governed by an all-powerful and perfectly good God, this is a notorious difficulty. In fact the problem of evil is surely the most persuasive consideration available in favour of atheism.

It is customary to dismiss such queries as ‘Can God create a being he cannot control?’ and ‘Can God create a knot he cannot untie?’ with the comment that such questions in fact fail to specify a task for God to perform. The reason given is that omnipotence is included in the idea of God, with the alleged result that such expressions as ‘a being God cannot control’ and ‘a knot God cannot untie’ contain contradictions. J.L. Cowan has argued that (...) this conventional response is mistaken, and subsequently expanded upon this contention in reply to some of its critics. I shall try to show that Cowan's defense of the coherence of expressions like these is mistaken, and with it his conclusion that since an omnipotent God clearly cannot perform such tasks the concept of omnipotence is self-contradictory.Cowan has no quarrel with one assumption of the customary reply. If the specification of a task is self-contradictory, he agrees that the inability of God to perform it is no blemish on his omnipotence. (shrink)