BackgroundPsychological distress/morbidity is amongst the primary reason for the cause of pain at multiple sites, its progression, and recovery. Though still not very clear if physical pain in the neck or the back may predict psychological morbidities or not. Thus, we investigated the association between combined neck or back pain and psychological distress/morbidity.MethodsA cross-sectional study was conducted in Al-Kharj, Saudi Arabia, including 1,003 individuals. The questionnaire comprised of General Health Questionnaire-12 and some questions about neck and back pain. Data analysis (...) was done using statistical software SPSS version 26.0.ResultsThe results of the multivariate analysis revealed a significant positive association between neck/back pain status and total GHQ score. Having neck/back pain had almost a 2.5 times greater risk of psychological distress/morbidity. Further, females were more likely to have a higher risk of psychological distress/morbidity than males while adjusting for sociodemographic and clinical characteristics.ConclusionThe combination of neck and back pain was significantly associated with the Saudi population’s psychological problems. Therefore, the Saudi government needs to devise high-risk strategies and allocate adequate resources to the cause so that at-risk people can be shielded from the adverse complications arising from this condition in the long run. (shrink)

The Business Model Canvas is a strategic model for developing business organizations’ roadmap toward achieving their goals. While several organizations utilize the Business Model Canvas to establish and operate their businesses well, the utilization of BMC seems to be limited in the local market of Saudi Arabia, especially when businesses utilize electronic business channels. This paper aims to explore the status of the utilization of BMC among Saudi SMEs, as a critical sector. The paper highlights the awareness and practice of (...) BMC’s nine factors before and during the operation of e-commerce stores by Saudi SMEs. Then, it aims to explore the significance of practicing those factors in increasing the satisfaction level of running businesses. In this paper, a quantitative survey was distributed conveniently to 200 SMEs in the two largest Saudi cities, which are Riyadh and Jeddah, resulting in 63 valid participations from different industries. After operating e-commerce stores, most SMEs gained more knowledge of five BMC factors: key partners, value propositions, customer relationships, customer segments, and cost structures. Meanwhile, they found some issues in the other four factors: key activities, key resources, channels, and revenue streams. The proposed method exposes the variety of results and indicates a lack of understanding of BMC by the examined e-commerce SME samples, as they depend on traditional methods of identifying the elements of each of the BMC factors. (shrink)

Many caricaturists get the idea for their caricature from current issues of society. The philosophy of the caricature lies in the opinion it presents, which discusses society’s goals, culture, and crises, and it is represented in an ironic way to deliver its visual message. The fight for women’s rights, inequality, and discrimination are examples of issues concerning Saudi women that have been represented by several caricaturists. Hence, the aim of this paper is to investigate female and male caricaturists’ linguistic and (...) semiotic representation of Saudi women’s challenging issues. Following (Kress and Van Leeuwen. 2006. Reading images: The grammar of visual design, 2nd edn. London: Routledge), a social semiotic multimodal approach to the analysis is adopted in this study, which is drawn from Halliday’s social semiotic theory. Twenty caricatures were carefully selected based on the content and the issues that are being discussed in the caricatures with a consideration of their relation to the aim of the study. The present study contributes to enriching Saudi women’s rights in relation to Saudi Vision 2030. The research is significant in that, in examining women/male caricaturists’ representations of the challenges and opportunities of Saudi women empowerment prior/after Saudi Vision 2030 in the workplace, social life, it contributes to understanding the supportive caricature discourse, basic social values for Saudi women, the pressures they undergo, and the success they have achieved so far in attaining their rights. The study findings show that both the semiotic and verbal elements of the caricatures were significant in delivering the messages for women’s rights in the new Saudi. (shrink)

Objectives: to assess physicians’ and patients’ views in Saudi Arabia towards involving the patient versus the family in the process of diagnosis disclosure and decision-making, and to compare them with views from the USA and Japan.Design: A self-completion questionnaire was translated to Arabic and validated.Participants: Physicians from different specialties and ranks and patients in a hospital or attending outpatient clinics from 6 different regions in KSA.Results: In the case of a patient with incurable cancer, 67% of doctors and 51% of (...) patients indicated that they would inform the patient in preference to the family of the diagnosis . Assuming the family already knew, 56% of doctors and 49% of patients would tell the patient even if family objected . However, in the case of HIV infection, 59% of physicians and 81% of patients would inform the family about HIV status without the patient’s consent . With regards to withholding ventilatory support, about 50% of doctors and over 60% of patients supported the use of mechanical ventilation in a patient with advanced cancer, regardless of the wishes of the patient or the family. Finally, the majority of doctors and patients were against assisted suicide.Conclusions: Although there was more recognition for a patient’s autonomy amongst physicians, most patients preferred a family centred model of care. Views towards information disclosure were midway between those of the USA and Japan. Distinctively, however, decisions regarding life prolonging therapy and assisted suicide were not influenced to a great extent by wishes of the patient or family, but more likely by religious beliefs. (shrink)

Breaking bad news (BBN) to parents whose newborn has a major disease is an ethical dilemma. In Saudi Arabia, BBN about newborns is performed according to the parental preferences that have been reported from non-Arabic/non-Islamic countries. Saudi mothers' preferences about BBN have not yet been studied. Therefore, we aimed to elicit the preferences of Saudi mothers about BBN concerning newborns. We selected a convenience sample of 402 Saudi mothers, aged 18-50 years, who had no previous experience with BBN. We selected (...) them via a simple number-randomization scheme from the premises of a level III Saudi hospital between October of 2009 and January of 2011. We used a hypothetical situation (BBN about trisomy 21) to elicit their preferences about BBN concerning newborns via a structured verbal questionnaire composed of 12 multiple-choice questions. We expressed their preferences as percentages (95% confidence interval), and we used the Kendall's W test (W) to assess the degree of agreement in preferences. The Saudi mothers preferred that BBN be conducted with both parents together (64% [60-69]), albeit with weak levels of agreement (W = 0.29). They showed moderate agreement in their preferences that BBN should be conducted early (79% [75-83], W = 0.48), in detail (81% [77-85], W = 0.52), in person (88% [85-91], W = 0.58), and in a quiet setting (86% [83-90], W = 0.53). With extremely weak agreement, they preferred to have a known person present for support during BBN (56% [51-61], W = 0.01), to have close bodily contact with their babies (66% [61-70], W = 0.10), and to have no another patients present (64% [59-68], W = 0.08). They showed moderate levels of agreement in their desires to detail, in advance, their preferences about process of BBN by giving a reversible, written informed consent that could be utilized for guidance, if needed (80% [76-84], W = 0.36). In our experience, Saudi mothers' preferences about BBN concerning newborns are varied, suggesting that a "one-size-fits-all" approach is inappropriate. A reversible, written informed consent detailing their preferences about BBN that would be kept in their medical records and utilized for guidance, if needed, may be the best solution, given this level of diversity. These findings merit further study. (shrink)

Apophaticism in mainstream analytic theology and philosophy of religion has come to denote a metaphysical and semantic thesis: that, due to divine transcendence, God is ineffable, inconceivable, or incomprehensible. But this conception fails to properly take account of the central claim of apophaticism as a special type of _mystical _theology. As such, the apophatic commitments to divine ineffability are instrumental. More fundamental is the function of theological ignorance to uniquely inform the task of theology and transform the theologian in union (...) with God. Taking Jonathan Jacobs’ recent account as a test case, I argue that reconstructions of apophaticism need to be supplemented by an account of this informational and personally transformative value that apophatic mysticism places on its commitment to divine incomprehensibility. I supply the needed account of apophatic valuing in terms of wonder as the appropriate emotional attitude toward divine transcendence. (shrink)

While the intersection between race and religion has been an important site for research for the sociology of religion and religious studies (in its descriptive dimensions) as well s theology (in its religiously normative dimensions), neither of these disciplines has incorporated recent work in the analytic philosophy of race. Analytic philosophy of race, for its part, has largely neglected the race/religion intersection, while analytic theologians by and large ignore the theological significance of race altogether. In this paper I am to (...) draw together these distinct disciplinary contributions—social-historical, philosophical and normative-theological—into a single integrated framework for a research program in analytic theology. I call that framework “religious racial formation theory,” and I claim that the work of specifying a determinate religious racial formation theory is not merely a (normatively driven) sociological and historical task but a necessarily philosophical one. I then detail what sorts of metaphysical determinations are required in order to yield an adequate explanation of the intersection uncovered by the socio-historical data summarized in the first section. (shrink)

Disparities exist in the health, livelihood, and opportunities for the 46-60 million people living in America’s rural communities. Rural communities across the United States need a new energy and focus concentrated around health and health care that allows for the designing capturing, and spreading of existing and new innovations. This paper aims to provide a framework for policy solutions to build a healthier rural America describing both the current state of rural health policy and the policies and practices in states (...) that could be used as a national model for positive change. (shrink)

Computer crime on the Internet poses asignificant threat to the well-being ofbusinesses and individuals, and none are immunefrom the repercussions that can result. Onetype of this unethical and unlawful activity isonline software piracy. In this work, thesignificance of piracy as a topic for academicinquiry is first presented, followed by asummary of the conflicting stances on thisissue. Then, a review of scholarly literaturepreviously conducted in this area is given toprovide a backdrop for the current research. Univariate and bivariate findings from aquantitative (...) study of students are used todemonstrate the incidence, scope, andassociated correlates of Internet piracy in auniversity setting. Technological and ethicalpolicy solutions that an institution mightimplement are suggested and discussed inconclusion. (shrink)

Psychology has been the significant discipline since the time of antiquity which becomes more consolidated during the medieval age of Islam. It had a strong foundation in the professional writings of polymaths from the Islamic Middle Ages that were eventually transmitted to the West. However, the unique psychological contributions of these medieval polymaths remained largely unexplored. Despite the growing interest in their work, which is partly due to Islamic psychology, only a handful of them have been investigated for their unique (...) psychological contributions, and a complete examination of psychological work has not been done, separately from an Islamic perspective. The majority of them have only been examined in terms of their medical value, neglecting psychological issues in their all-encompassing approaches to care. Therefore, it was quintessential to extensively explore all those scholars who contributed to the various fields of psychology and to fill a gap of information that has been left by the previous researchers. (shrink)

The study focuses on the mobile telecommunications industry in Afghanistan prior to the Taliban takeover of the country in 2021 and seeks to study how the mobile telecommunications corporations engage with the different area-specific governance systems in order to gain legitimacy to operate across Afghanistan. The study capitalises on mixed qualitative data to conduct an embedded case study of the Afghan mobile telecommunications industry as an extreme context for understanding business-society relations in South Asia. Theoretically, the article integrates insights from (...) governance literature on areas of limited statehood to conceptualise business–society relations in Afghanistan beyond state-centric views and assumptions. The findings result in two modalities of business engagement that are conceptualised as a single vis-à-vis multiple governance system approach. Each of these modes of engagement implies a political nature and role for the businesses that are embedded in ethical dilemmas as discussed in the article. These findings contribute to the debate on the ‘political turn’ in the CSR literature and the governance literature on areas of limited statehood. (shrink)

At the core of public reason liberalism is the idea that the exercise of political power is legitimate only if based on laws or political rules that are justifiable to all reasonable citizens. Call this the Public Justification Principle. Public reason liberals face the persistent objection that the Public Justification Principle is self-defeating. The idea that a society’s political rules must be justifiable to all reasonable citizens is intensely controversial among seemingly reasonable citizens of every liberal society. So, the objection (...) goes, the Public Justification Principle is not justifiable to all reasonable citizens, and thus fails its own test of legitimacy. And this, critics conclude, undermines the public reason liberal project. This article argues that answering the self-defeat objection to public reason liberalism requires fundamentally rethinking prevailing accounts of the Public Justification Principle’s role. My aim is to develop an account of the Public Justification Principle that vindicates its coherence and moral appeal in the face of reasonable disagreement. (shrink)

This paper discusses thepractical impact of a non-materialistic cultureon sustainable farm management.Two elements are discussed: first, how deeplyrooted religion is in this culture; second,the feasibility of using both human knowledgeand experience, so-called tradition and divineguidance in management. Finally, theimplications of the fusion of these twoelements are drawn. The outcome is thecapability of man to integrate ethical valuesinto decisions and actions. This integration,when applied by skilled farmers, leads to amanagement of natural resources in analtruistic fashion and not merely to economicends. Moreover, (...) it makes agriculture meaningfuland sustainable. (shrink)

The perception of separation between school and home/community is related to diminished achievement in school and lack of motivation to learn STEM subjects. The National Council of Educational Research and Training is among many research organisations that have strongly recommended that schools bridge the disconnect between school-based knowledge and learners’ everyday knowledge. We designed the SPIRALS curriculum to bridge this gap between formal science and students’ everyday lives. SPIRALS helps students explore community-based practices to learn about science, environmental sustainability and (...) systems thinking. We implemented the SPIRALS curriculum in a private, urban, English medium school in Western India with approximately 315 students and their four teachers, 214 of whom also participated in the research from which our conclusions are drawn. Our findings about program impacts rely upon analysis of interviews with teachers and students, as well as student work, and conference participation assessment surveys distributed after a capstone experience at which students present their work. This chapter describes our findings about how students learned science, environmental sustainability, and systems thinking through engagement with community-based practices. We also discuss the process of how the SPIRALS approach worked in India and how it could be expanded into a broader learning model across different socio-cultural contexts within India. (shrink)

Organizations today recognize that it is not only important to engage in corporate social responsibility, but that it is also equally important to ensure that information about CSR is communicated to audiences. At times, however, the CSR image perceived by audiences is not an accurate portrayal of the organization’s CSR identity and is, therefore, incongruent with the desired CSR image. In this paper, we build upon the nascent work on organizational impression management by examining CSR communication from an impression management (...) perspective. The model developed here proposes that incongruence between desired and current CSR images motivates an organization to decrease the incongruence through CSR communication. This relationship is moderated by four factors: importance of CSR image to the organization; power, status, and attractiveness of the target audience; importance of CSR image to the target audience; and media attention and public scrutiny. The model also identifies four dimensions of CSR communication structure and includes a feedback loop through which audience interpretation of the CSR communication can influence the organization’s CSR image incongruence. Two illustrative examples are provided to indicate how the model may be applied to organizations. This paper has several implications for research and practice. It draws connections between impression management theory and CSR and adds to the emerging literature on organizational impression management. It can also help organizations decide on the appropriate CSR communication structure to use in specific situations and be more effective in their CSR communication. (shrink)

In _Divine Holiness and Divine Action _Mark Murphy seeks to establish four key claims: first, that divine holiness consists in a supreme desirability of creaturely union with God and a commensurately supreme creaturely unfittingness for that union; second, that this holiness-concept is grounded in a value-gap between God and creatures which by default motivates God to withdraw from creatures rather than love us or seek our welfare; third, that the love and concern for creaturely welfare exhibited in God’s creating and (...) redeeming is a contingent and freely chosen override of the default stance of holiness; and fourth, that God should be thanked and emulated in virtue of exhibiting a kind of humility in overriding the demands of holiness for our sakes, though not worshipped or praised for this humility, since these latter attitudes should be reserved for necessary rather than contingent features of God. I argue that each of these four claims is mistaken, and further that it is a good thing they are mistaken, because if Murphy’s account were right the appropriate response to God would be neither worship nor thanks but rather abject despair. (shrink)

J. L. Schellenberg has recently argued that there is a logical incompatibility between God’s being perfectly loving and there being non-resistant nonbelievers in the proposition that God exists. In this paper I highlight the parallel between this claim and the claim made by the logical problem of evil. Following Plantinga’s strategy in undermining the logical problem of evil, I argue that all that is needed to undermine the alleged incompatibility of divine love with non-resistant non-belief is a counterexample showing how (...) the two might possibly co-exist. But whereas most attempts to show this have been grounded anthropologically, by drawing on forms of love-relationship that God and humans have in common, I offer a defense of the compatibility of perfect divine love with human non-resistant non-belief in God’s existence grounded theologically, in the unique sort of love relationship that God wants with us, which is the relationship of “imaging.”. (shrink)

How is the validity of our consent, and others’ moral permission to act on our consent affected by coercion? Everyone agrees that in cases of two-party coercion—when X coerces Y to do something with or for X—the consent of the coerced is invalid, and the coercer is not permitted to act upon the consent they receive. But coercers and the recipients of consent are not always identical. Sometimes a victim, Y, agrees to do something to, with, or for Z because (...) they are being coerced by X. Recently, several philosophers have argued that consent under third-party coercion can be fully valid. We argue that this view has troubling implications. We develop a novel view of consent in third-party coercion cases, which we call the partial validity account. The core idea is that, under severe coercion, Y’s consent is at most partially valid—it reduces the strength of, but does not completely dissolve, Z’s consent-sensitive duties. We argue that the partial validity account gets the right results in important cases and explains the moral factors at play better than alternative accounts. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

The open secret of analytic philosophy of religion since its 20th century revival has been that it is for the most part a revival of philosophical theology, and particularly Christian philosophical theology. More recently, Christian analytic philosophers and theologians sympathetic to them have transformed this open secret into a research program by explicitly thematizing the use of analytic philosophical tools for the particular work of Christian theology. Dubbing this work as “analytic theology” (AT) Oliver Crisp and Michael Rea have succeeded (...) in inaugurating AT as a distinct subregion in the philosophy of religion. Besides prompting a spate of first-rate philosophical work theorizing a variety of Christian theological commitments, the advent of AT has also prompted a good deal of meta-theological reflection: Is AT more conducive for certain conceptions of Christian theology than others? Among the various kinds of theology produced by AT, liberation theology is notably absent. In this paper, I offer a diagnosis of why that might be, outline an argument for analytic engagement with liberation theology, and sketch what such an engagement might consist in. (shrink)

In this essay we criticise Rainer Forst's attempt to draw a connection between power and justification, and thus ground his normative theory of a right to justification. Forst draws this connection primarily conceptually, though we will also consider whether a normative connection may be drawn within his framework. Forst's key insight is that if we understand power as operating by furnishing those subjected to it with reasons, then we create a space for the normative contestation of any exercise of power. (...) He calls this the noumenal understanding of power. Against the conceptual connection between power and justification, we argue that (i) on most plausible accounts of political freedom, some freedom-restrictions commonly attributed to the successful exercise of power would perplexingly count as failures of power on Forst's view, and that (ii) on the most plausible account of reason-recognition, namely an appropriateness of response account, a justification relation is only a sufficient but not necessary condition for recognition. Against the normative connection, we argue that (iii) Forst can establish the existence of a right to justification only if he reconsiders the transcendental aspirations of his theory. (shrink)

A fundamental problem in Christian theology has been that of determining whether God can be an object of experience and how we should account for God's empirical availability to us. Can experiences of God serve to inform and justify our theological beliefs and practices? The central claim in this work is that there is a radical mistake in many contemporary accounts that require grounding a theological story of Gods availability to us in experience in a prior general philosophical theory of (...) perception. Instead, it is argued that the philosophical problem of perception is a pseudoproblem and that in virtue of their entanglement with that pseudoproblem, the influential accounts of Christian religious experience, such as in Jean-Luc Marion, Kevin Hector, or William P. Alston, are at bottom incoherent. The study concludes with a new reading of Gregory of Nyssa and his theology of the spiritual senses, which is free from the bewitchment of the problem of perception. This critical retrieval of Nyssen opens the path toward a viable contemporary theological empiricism, one that characterizes both tasks of theological contemplation and spiritual formation in terms of a receptivity and responsiveness to the perceptible presence and agency of God in the world. (shrink)

Many philosophers argue that individuals have duties to do their fair shares of the demands of achieving important common ends. But what happens when some individuals fail to do their fair shares?...

In air traffic control, the airspace is divided into several smaller sectors for better management of air traffic and air traffic controller workload. Such sectors are usually managed by a team of two air traffic controllers: planning controller and executive controller. D-side controller is responsible for processing flight-plan information to plan and organize the flow of traffic entering the sector. R-side controller deals with ensuring safety of flights in their sector. A better understanding and predictability of D-side controller actions, for (...) a given traffic scenario, may help in automating some of its tasks and hence reduce workload. In this paper, we propose a learning model to predict D-side controller actions. The learning problem is modeled as a supervised learning problem, where the target variables are D-side controller actions and the explanatory variables are the aircraft 4D trajectory features. The model is trained on six months of ADS-B data over an en-route sector, and its generalization performance was assessed, using crossvalidation, on the same sector. Results indicate that the model for vertical maneuver actions provides highest prediction accuracy. Besides, the model for speed change and course change action provides predictability accuracy of 80% and 87%, respectively. The model to predict the set of all the actions for each flight achieves an accuracy of 70% implying for 70% of flights; D-side controller’s action can be predicted from trajectory information at sector entry position. In terms of operational validation, the proposed approach is envisioned as ATCO assisting tool, not an autonomous tool. Thus, there is always ATCO discretion element, and as more ATCO actions are collected, the models can be further trained for better accuracy. For future work, we will consider expanding the feature set by including parameters such as weather and wind. Moreover, human in the loop simulation will be performed to measure the effectiveness of the proposed approach. (shrink)

Accompanying the explosive growth of information technology is the increasing frequency of antisocial and criminal behavior on the Internet. Online software piracy is one such behavior, and this study approaches the phenomenon through the theoretical framework of neutralization theory. The suitability and applicability of nine techniques of neutralization in determining the act is tested via logistic regression analyses on cross-sectional data collected from a sample of university students in the United States. Generally speaking, neutralization was found to be weakly related (...) to experience with online software piracy; other elements which appear more salient are suggested and discussed in conclusion. (shrink)

The theory of deliberative democracy is a field of democratic theory that studies the contribution of public discussion, argumentation, and reasoning to the normative justification of democratic decision‐making. In this essay, we first explore two competing visions of the moral ideal of deliberative democracy: the rational consensus conception and the wide conception. This establishes a normative framework for analyzing several important applied issues that arise in thinking about deliberative democracy in the real world: the role of cognitive diversity in deliberative (...) decision‐making, the problem of rational ignorance, inequality in public deliberation, and the problem of group polarization. (shrink)

This paper asks how perception becomes racializing and seeks the means for its critical interruption. My aim is not only to understand the recalcitrant and limitative temporal structure of racializing habits of seeing, but also to uncover the possibilities within perception for a critical awareness and destabilization of this structure. Reading Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in dialogue with Frantz Fanon, Iris Marion Young and race-critical feminism, I locate in hesitation the phenomenological moment where habits of seeing can be internally (...) fractured. Hesitation, I claim, makes visible the exclusionary logic of racializing and objectifying perception, countering its affective closure and opening it to critical transformation. (shrink)

The United States has the fastest growing prison population in the world, and elevated incarceration rates, substance use, and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevalence are fueling each other. Yet without a national guideline mandated for HIV care within the prison system, standards for state and federal prisons vary greatly.

In this introductory article we explore the relationship between statehood and governance, examining in more detail how non-state actors like MNCs, international NGOs, and indigenous authorities, often under conditions of extreme economic scarcity, ethnic diversity, social inequality and violence, take part in the making of rules and the provision of collective goods. Conceptually, we focus on the literature on Areas of Limited Statehood and discuss its usefulness in exploring how business-society relations are governed in the global South, and beyond. Building (...) on insights from this literature, among others, the four articles included in this special issue provide rich illustrations and critical reflections on the multiple, complex and often ambiguous roles of state and non-state actors operating in contemporary Syria, Nigeria, India and Palestine, with implications for conventional understandings of CSR, stakeholders, and related conceptualizations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Acting Person and Christian Moral Life by Darlene Fozard WeaverSameer YadavThe Acting Person and Christian Moral Life By Darlene Fozard Weaver WASHINGTON, DC: GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2011. 215 PP. $32.95In this carefully argued and theologically subtle study of human moral agency, Darlene Fozard Weaver describes a large-scale shift in theological ethics away from an “act-centered” approach and toward a more “person-centered” approach. She catalogues the shift via (...) recent debates between those with “traditionalist” and “revisionist” attitudes toward the moral status of particular actions in Roman Catholic ethics. Whereas the traditionalist position claims that the intrinsic evil of particular acts is determinative of the moral blameworthiness of the acting person, revisionists hold that the moral status of any act is more fundamentally determined by the orientation of the person to his or her act. This revisionist movement toward a person-centric analysis reflects a wider trend that also includes Protestant ethics, particularly in the twentieth-century resurgence of virtue ethics prompted by MacIntyre and Hauerwas. [End Page 210]Against this backdrop, Weaver wishes to side neither with those traditional act-centric models that culminated in the regulation of personal acts found in pre–Vatican II penitential manuals nor with the more recent person-centric models that privilege the moral interiority of the acting person. Each, she argues, has its gains and losses. The traditional picture rightly gives our particular actions their own fundamental moral significance, but at the expense of tending toward a kind of Pelagianism. The revisionist picture recognizes the irreducibility of our subjective orientation to particular acts, but it leaves the moral significance of personal actions and our resources for navigating moral dilemmas problematically open-ended. Crucially, both pictures, with their narrow fixation on moral culpability, restrict the moral significance of personal actions.Weaver’s contribution is to sketch an account acknowledging the irreducibility of the fundamental orientation of the acting person to his or her acts, while attending to the way that particular actions retain their power for determining that orientation. She builds a picture of this reflexive relation between person and act by way of its instantiation in the relation of sin to particular sins; intimacy with God as bound up in our actual relations to self and others; fidelity to God as a matter not primarily of moral culpability but of moral responsibility in negotiating the particular demands that others place on us; truthfulness before God as the kind of naming of our actions required by the vision of fidelity shared by our community; and reconciliation with God as realized in the healing enabled by acts of forgiveness for our breaches of fidelity. Each moment in this development of her overall picture carefully builds upon the moment preceding it to produce a rich and compelling picture of human moral economy as an outworking of (rather than meriting of) divine grace.Throughout the book, Weaver’s theological interests in moral theorizing are stressed over the philosophical ones, and this may disappoint readers wondering how a theology of human action supervenes on issues such as (in) compatibilism about free will or the metaphysics of agent causation. Although Weaver’s refocusing of our attention on the significance of particular actions is salutary, her criticism of virtue-based approaches as incomplete is attenuated by her dependence upon the Hauerwasian conception of virtue to explicate the very notion of reflexivity that she defends. Such worries notwithstanding, Weaver has given us an extraordinarily fruitful framework for Christian moral theology. Moreover, it is expressed lucidly and makes excellent use of literary sources and current events to illustrate her analysis. Given its depth and accessibility, the book not only is required reading for Christian moral theologians but also deserves a wider readership from anyone interested in making theological sense of human agency. [End Page 211]Sameer YadavIndiana Wesleyan UniversityCopyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)