In A New Moral Vision, Andrea L. Turpin explores how the entrance of women into U.S. colleges and universities shaped changing ideas about the moral and religious purposes of higher education in unexpected ways, and in turn profoundly shaped American culture. In the decades before the Civil War, evangelical Protestantism provided the main impetus for opening the highest levels of American education to women. Between the Civil War and World War I, however, shifting theological beliefs, a growing cultural pluralism, and a new emphasis on university research led educators to reevaluate how colleges should inculcate an ethical outlook in students—just as the proportion of female collegians swelled. In this environment, Turpin argues, educational leaders articulated a new moral vision for their institutions by positioning them within the new landscape of competing men’s, women’s, and coeducational colleges and universities. In place of fostering evangelical conversion, religiously liberal educators sought to foster in students a surprisingly more gendered ideal of character and service than had earlier evangelical educators. Because of this moral reorientation, the widespread entrance of women into higher education did not shift the social order in as egalitarian a direction as we might expect. Instead, college graduates—who formed a disproportionate number of the leaders and reformers of the Progressive Era—contributed to the creation of separate male and female cultures within Progressive Era public life and beyond. Drawing on extensive archival research at ten trend-setting men’s, women’s, and coeducational colleges and universities, A New Moral Vision illuminates the historical intersection of gender ideals, religious beliefs, educational theories, and social change in ways that offer insight into the nature—and cultural consequences—of the moral messages communicated by institutions of higher education today.
Richard Hays explores the ethical values and dynamics with which Jesus himself lived to show how the New Testament provides challenging moral guidance on some of the most important contemporary ethical issues.
Moral Thinking is critical of mainstream academic ethics for being pretty nearly stuck on Kant and Mill, for neglecting nonviolence (Gandhi and King), for nearly neglecting the women's movement (it is not yet central to most ethics texts and courses), for largely neglecting the anti-racism movement (also marginal in academic ethics), and for almost totally neglecting the anti-imperialism movement. Moral Vision suggests an integrated approach that includes these often-neglected elements and also recognizes aesthetic and experiential dimensions of ethical reflection. This book will be of interest to anyone wondering what philosophy may contribute to our contemporary struggle with conflicting values and value collisions, personal as well as cultural.
Almost all Americans believe in God. But, the author shows, this belief has little impact on their lives. He finds them unable to see any meaning in life, lacking any heroes, and without a compelling moral vision.
With his square, bulldoggish stature, signature rimless glasses, and inimitable smile—part grimace, part snarl—Theodore Roosevelt was an unforgettable figure, imprinted on the American memory through photographs, the chiseled face of Mount Rushmore, and, especially, film. At once a hunter, explorer, naturalist, woodsman, and rancher, Roosevelt was the quintessential frontiersman, a man who believed that only nature could truly test and prove the worth of man. A documentary he made about his 1909 African safari embodied aggressive ideas of masculinity, power, racial superiority, and the connection between nature and manifest destiny. These ideas have since been reinforced by others—Jesse “Buff alo” Jones, Paul Rainey, Martin and Osa Johnson, and Walt Disney. Using Roosevelt as a starting point, filmmaker and scholar Ronald Tobias traces the evolution of American attitudes toward nature, attitudes that remain, to this day, remarkably conflicted, complex, and instilled with dreams of empire.
War wounds the soul. It is not only the violence that warfighters suffer against them that harms, but also the violence that they do. These soul wounds have come to be known as moral injuries: psychic traumas that occur from having done or condoned that which goes against deeply held moral principles. It is not surprising that the committing of atrocities or the accidental killing of the innocent would hurt the soul of warfighters. The problem is that many warfighters at least tacitly follow the commonplace belief that killing another human being is always wrong--it's just that sometimes, as in war, it is necessary. This paradoxical commitment makes the very business of warfighting morally injurious. This problem is also a crisis. Clinical research among combat veterans has established a link between killing in combat and moral injury and between moral injury and suicide. Our warfighters, even those who have served honorably and with the right intentions, are dying by their own hands at devastating rates--casualties not of the physical threats of war, but of the moral ones. It does not have to be this way. The just war tradition, a moral framework for thinking about war that flows out of our Greco-Roman and Hebraic intellectual traditions, is grounded in the basic truth that killing comes in different kinds. While some kinds of killing, like murder, are always wrong, there are other kinds of killing that are morally neutral, such as unavoidable accidents, and still other kinds that are morally permitted--even, sometimes, obligatory. The Good Kill embraces this tradition to argue for the morality of killing in justified wars. Marc LiVecche does not deny the morally bruising realities of combat, but offers potential remedies to help our warfighters manage the bruising without becoming irreparably morally injured.
Lovescapes introduces the reader to the various meanings and manifestations of love and its many cognates such as compassion, caring, altruism, empathy, and forgiveness. It addresses how love and compassion have been understood in history and the religions of the world. It goes on to explore the ways that our environments and heredity influence our capacity to love and suggests ways to cultivate love and compassion in one's life. The book shows how the values of love and compassion are integral to finding humane solutions to the daunting problems we face as individuals, as a human family, and as an earth community--a world in crisis. Lovescapes has the following features: -Describing how love is the essence of the divine, and therefore the ground of reality -Understanding the meaning of love and its place in our lives -Learning how love and compassion have been understood across history, culture, and tradition -Gaining insight about how to increase our capacity to love and show compassion -Discerning how love and compassion can be applied in all aspects of our lives, in the regions where we live, and in our global setting.
The relationship between theology and praxis is an important subject that requires further attention from biblical scholars. As the need for social theology or praxis increases, so does the challenge for it to be informed by sound biblical exegesis. This book explores the interplay between theology and praxis using the Christian identity of the elect in 1 Peter as a paradigm. Who are the elect and what is the significance of the identity in 1 Peter? This study employs an exegetical hermeneutical approach to underline the 'present' ethical dimension of this identity with its implicit missionary purpose, not only within the first century but also in the twenty-first century as a necessary corollary of the identity. 1 Peter is applied to a twenty-first century context - the Nigerian Anglican Church - to underline the continuing relevance of Scripture and thereby propose 'conscious' interaction as a veritable and vital missiological strategy that facilitates 'reactive' evangelism with potentials for making theology an independent social variable. Although it makes direct reference to the Nigerian Church, the main argument of this book is applicable anywhere - to be God's elect is to live no longer as before but in newness of life. This book not only underlines the importance of 1 Peter but also raises important challenges that no 'living church' can afford to ignore. It is suitable for use in biblical studies, NT interpretation and applied theology, and African Christian studies, especially on the transition from missions to churches in Nigeria.
America is at a pivotal crossroads. The soul of our nation is at stake and in peril. A new public narrative is needed to unite Americans around common values and to counter the increasing discord and acrimony in our politics and culture. The process of healing and creating a more perfect union in our nation must start now. The moral vision of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Beloved Community, which animated and galvanized the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, provides a hopeful way forward. In A More Perfect Union, Adam Russell Taylor, president of Sojourners, reimagines a contemporary version of the Beloved Community that will inspire and unite Americans across generations, geographic and class divides, racial and gender differences, faith traditions, and ideological leanings. In the Beloved Community, neither privilege nor punishment is tied to race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or economic status, and everyone is able to realize their full potential and thrive. Building the Beloved Community requires living out a series of commitments, such as true equality, radical welcome, transformational interdependence, E Pluribus Unum ("out of many, one"), environmental stewardship, nonviolence, and economic equity. By building the Beloved Community we unify the country around a shared moral vision that transcends ideology and partisanship, tapping into our most sacred civic and religious values, enabling our nation to live up to its best ideals and realize a more perfect union.
Climate change is a major framing condition for sustainable development of agriculture and food. Global food production is a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions and at the same time it is among the sectors worst affected by climate change. This book brings together a multidisciplinary group of authors exploring the ethical dimensions of climate change and food. Conceptual clarifications provide a necessary basis for putting sustainable development into practice. Adaptation and mitigation demand altering both agricultural and consumption practices. Intensive vs. extensive production is reassessed with regard to animal welfare, efficiency and environmental implications. Property rights pay an ever-increasing role, as do shifting land-use practices, agro-energy, biotechnology, food policy to green consumerism. And, last but not least, tools are suggested for teaching agricultural and food ethics. Notwithstanding the plurality of ethical analyses and their outcome, it becomes apparent that governance of agri-food is faced by new needs and new approaches of bringing in the value dimension much more explicitly. This book is intended to serve as a stimulating collection that will contribute to debate and reflection on the sustainable future of agriculture and food production in the face of global change.
The book explores the philosophical thinking of Petrarch and Boccaccio in contrast to the writings of contemporary mendicants. Examining both Latin and vernacular works, it investigates how these humanists poetically express the temporal, subjective, and emotional quality of moral sensibility, in a way that shifts to the reader the weight of discerning the ethical message. The book centers its analysis on a series of paradoxes pondered by these humanists: the self that changes yet persists over time; the awareness of self-deception; the individual's validation of authority; and the ethics of pleasure. This study is valuable to those interested in Renaissance philosophy, literature, religion, and the history of ideas.
