Sullivan and Kymlicka seek to provide an alternative to post-9/11 pessimism about the ability of serious ethical dialogue to resolve disagreements and conflict across national, religious, and cultural differences. It begins by acknowledging the gravity of the problem: on our tightly interconnected planet, entire populations look for moral guidance to a variety of religious and cultural traditions, and these often stiffen, rather than soften, opposing moral perceptions. How, then, to set minimal standards for the treatment of persons while developing moral (...) bases for coexistence and cooperation across different ethical traditions? The Globalization of Ethics argues for a tempered optimism in approaching these questions. Its distinguished contributors report on some of the most globally influential traditions of ethical thought in order to identify the resources within each tradition for working toward consensus and accommodation among the ethical traditions that shape the contemporary world. (shrink)

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.

Studies the social science of moral inquiry as an attempt to develop a psychology and sociology that would explain the complex in terms of the simple as the new physics was doing in the natural realm.

"This interesting volume of essays on contemporary religion and its ambivalent relationship to modernity not only serves as a testimony to the intellectual influence of Robert Bellah, it establishes a new school of comparative religious and social thought. This Bellahian school--at the intersection of sociological, theological, and contemporary philosophical thinking--has roots in Durkheim and Weber, borrows insights from Marx, Foucault, and Bourdieu, and finds its clearest voice in the writings of Bellah himself. The essays by some of Bellah's colleagues and (...) former students that have been gathered in this volume address some of the most sagacious of these Bellahian themes: the religious dimension of contemporary civil societies, the relationship between religious and capitalist values, the cultural critique of modernity, and the moral visions that hold a promise of civic renewal."—Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (California, 2000). "This highly readable collection of original, thought-provoking essays by leading scholars provides fresh insights into the issues that Robert Bellah has addressed so fruitfully in his long career. Readers will learn much about such issues as how Calvinism contributed to political revolution, why democracies require an enlarged sense of political community, how the religious foundations of Japan and the United States differ, and what it means to be a Christian and an American."—Benton Johnson, coauthor of Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Protestant Baby Boomers (1994) and author of Functionalism in Modern Sociology: Understanding Talcott Parsons (1975). (shrink)

Modern American medicine has wedded scientific advance to a small business model of the individual practitioner, defining professionalism as technical understanding. If the profession is to survive, it must draw on older ideals of the learned professions as acting on behalf of the community, and reinvigorate a civic understanding of professional life.

In a remarkable experiment lasting over a decade, a group of 88 independent campuses, ranging from comprehensive universities to intimate colleges, have demonstrated the value of an emerging educational agenda focused on infusing the exploration of meaning and purpose into undergraduate life. These programs have shown that college can provide emerging adults with an understanding of themselves and today’s insecure and highly competitive world that enhances their ability to develop the resilience to create meaningful lives. By focusing on the exploration (...) of vocation, including its theological meanings, these efforts produced remarkable outcomes in enhanced student engagement in learning and more effective entry into adult life. Discernment of vocation provided, for many students, a synthetic and compelling focus for intellectual and practical exploration. Sustained by articulate reflection and grounded in communities of learning that included faculty as well as students, undergraduate life took on new significance and urgency. Examining the experiences of students and faculty, this book reveals the concrete importance of this educational agenda for individual lives and particular campuses. By connecting the several dimensions of undergraduate experience through reflection on purpose, these programs expanded the bandwidth of academic learning to strengthen the broad aims of liberal education. Within the larger, troubled environment of contemporary higher education these pioneering efforts hold promise for a significant rethinking of the undergraduate experience to better serve students and society. (shrink)

_Examining inequality through the lenses of moral traditions_ Rising inequality has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years from scholars and politicians, but the moral dimensions of inequality tend to be ignored. Is inequality morally acceptable? Is it morally permissible to allow practices and systems that contribute to inequality? Is there an ethical obligation to try to alleviate inequality, and if so, who is obligated to take that action? This book addresses these and similar questions not through a (...) single lens of morality but through a comparative study of ethical traditions, both secular and religious, Western and non-Western. The moral and political traditions considered are: liberalism, Marxism, natural law, feminism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and Confucianism. The types of inequality examined include property, natural resources, products, wealth, income, jobs, and taxation. The editors open the book with an introduction providing information on contemporary dimensions of the problem of economic inequality, and the book concludes with a summary of the perspectives represented. _Economic Inequality and Morality_ is unusual in that it addresses similarities and differences on the questions of inequality within and across moral traditions. Authors of the individual studies answer a common set of topic-related questions, giving the reader a broad perspective on how a broad range of traditions view and respond to inequality. (shrink)

Deepening and developing the seminal vision of _Habits of the Heart_, this volume presents original essays by leading thinkers in the social sciences, philosophy, and religion.

Rhetorical theory has developed powerful criticisms of pretentions to objectivity, in the spirit of deconstruction and ideology critique. These critiques contain nihilistic tendencies when they become abstracted from the interactive social contexts upon which they depend for their own significance and efficacy. With a rich analysis of the social bases of communication sustained by its commitment to the project of deliberative democracy, the classic Pragmatism of John Dewey and G. H. Mead can provide an important corrective by orienting rhetorical theory (...) toward reflective social-political engagement. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Private Acts, Social Consequences. By Ronald Bayer.