bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
How does exposure work?
Authors: Farrell Nicholas R. , Becker Carolyn Black , Waller Glenn
Published: January 2024

Although the effectiveness of exposure therapy is well supported in scientific research, less is known about how exposure therapy exerts its therapeutic influence. Nonetheless, research has provided scientific support for several proposed mechanisms of action by which patients experience relief from their symptoms via exposure therapy. This chapter gives readers an overview of these important mechanisms of change that are believed to underlie the benefits associated with exposure therapy. Specifically, habituation of anxiety, violation of fear expectancies (i.e., safety learning), and enhancements in self-efficacy are all described as important mechanisms of action in exposure therapy. Readers are guided in identifying their own life experiences that are illustrative of the mechanisms of action described in this chapter.
Learning Without Lessons
Authors: Lancy David F.
Published: January 2024

This work is designed to fill a rather large lacuna in the field of child development and education. A growing scholarly consensus challenges the universality of Western-dominated research in psychology. All or most markers of the child’s growth and development are now subject to reexamination through a cross-cultural lens. By the same token, the study of education has been similarly restricted as norms and theory are constructed almost exclusively from research in Euroamerican schools. This work aims to fill a substantial portion of this gap, in particular to document and analyze the myriad processes that come to play as indigenous children learn their culture—without schools or lessons. It will characterize the conglomeration of learning-rich events as instances of “pedagogy in culture.” The construct has several connotations, but paramount is the idea that opportunities for learning occur naturally in the course of activities such as work, play, nighttime campfire stories, and so on, that are not primarily intended to educate. Two significant sources of data will be drawn on: focused, empirical studies in cultural psychology and accounts of childhood in the ethnographic and archaeological records. These latter sources have been underutilized in speculations on the nature of child development and learning. The overall conclusion from this study is that the pedagogy found in communities before the advent of schooling differs in very significant ways from that practiced in schools and in the homes of schooled parents. These differences help to account for the early failure of many introduced schools to educate their naïve subjects successfully.
The Chore Curriculum
Authors: Lancy David F.
Published: January 2024

A major transition in the child’s education occurs when play is gradually superseded by work. Play is appreciated as a means to keep children busy and out of the way. But virtually every skill is first encountered in play, and the “play stage” is seen as the essential first step in the chore curriculum. Once the child is perceived as making a real contribution to the family economy, others pay closer attention. Above all, the child for the first time will be assigned specific tasks. Indigenous children take on a variety of chores, and each task has its own curriculum or “ladder” of skills to master and then deploy. This chapter catalogs the varied inventory of child work and the learning process associated with each.
The Transition to Structured Learning
Authors: Lancy David F.
Published: January 2024

To accentuate the unique aspects of Indigenous pedagogy, this chapter reviews the origin and spread of schooling. These antecedents such as Mesopotamia and Egypt feature rote memorization, the child’s loss of autonomy, and corporal punishment as examples. The Indigenous community may also incorporate more school-like institutions to carry out specific pedagogical goals. These might include the training of expert navigators, complex skills learned during apprenticeship, and the severe indoctrination found in initiation rites. The chapter also features the recent history of public schools finding their way into school-less villages and the consequences.
Global WEIRDing
Authors: Lancy David F.
Published: January 2024

Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic (WEIRD) notions of pedagogy, as many other aspects of WEIRD culture, are spreading rapidly around the world. The most obvious sign of this phenomenon is that a larger and larger proportion of the world’s population is schooled. This chapter reviews four areas where this transformation is having a major impact. “Lesson Creep” documents the growing role that formal education plays in the lives of both WEIRD and village children. The second topic in the chapter, “Lost Skills,” follows directly from the first. If schooling is occupying a larger and larger portion of the child’s time, it follows that children will have much less time to benefit from local, Indigenous pedagogy. Another victim of WEIRDing is the drive to fit in, be helpful, and learn to work collaboratively. The third topic in the chapter is labeled “The Schooled Mind.” Recent research is focused on the decline or absence of Indigenous cognitive and social skills due to schooling. A major shift takes place as the pedagogy of the village—direct, hands-on experience—is replaced by lessons that are delivered primarily through speech and printed material. The fourth topic to consider is the future of research on Indigenous pedagogy. The study of pedagogy in Indigenous communities has been significantly compromised by the spread of formal education. A community where children no longer participate in subsistence activity is, for the purpose of comparative analysis, already WEIRD. The chapter ends with a review of the major points made throughout the book.
The Classical Upaniṣads
Authors: Cohen Signe
Published: January 2024

The Upaniṣads are central Hindu philosophical and religious texts, composed in Sanskrit from the eighth century bce onward that focus on the identity between a person’s inner self, ātman, and the cosmic divine force, brahman. According to the Upaniṣads, the knowledge of the mystical identity between ātman and brahman can lead to immortality and liberation from rebirth. The Classical Upaniṣads: A Guide is an accessible guide to the older Upaniṣads, written both for college students and for a general audience with an interest in Indian religion, philosophy, and culture. This volume explores the historical, geographical, and social context of the classical Upaniṣads; discusses issues of dating, authorship, and transmission of the texts; and analyzes central ideas in the Upaniṣads, such as ātman, brahman, karma, reincarnation, mokṣa, knowledge, and sacred sounds (mantras). This book also discusses the importance of the Upaniṣads for Hinduism and Indian culture, as well as the reception of the Upaniṣads in the West.
Dating and Authorship
Authors: Cohen Signe
Published: January 2024

This chapter discusses the dating of the classical Upaniṣads. Most scholarly estimates of the date of composition for the classical Upaniṣads range from around 800 bce to 100 ce, and chapter 3 outlines the various types of evidence (archaeological, linguistic, and textual) that have been used to arrive at dates of composition for the Upaniṣads. The authorship and transmission of the Upaniṣads are described in more detail, and the chapter also analyzes claims to secrecy in the Upaniṣads. Several Upaniṣadic texts state that their teachings should only be shared with initiated students, not with outsiders. The chapter suggests that these assertions of secrecy should not necessarily be taken literally, but rather that secrecy is a discursive activity that marks boundaries and structures power relationships in these texts.
Being Single in the 21st Century
Authors: Kislev Elyakim
Published: January 2024

This chapter surveys the recent literature on singlehood and examines the reasons and consequences of the choice to remain single, in four parts. First, the chapter introduces the concept of singlehood and its various definitions. In the second part, the chapter delves into the reasons and circumstances that lead people to be single. The third part explores how cultural norms and societal expectations play into singles’ well-being and social standing. The fourth part discusses the implications of singlehood on mental well-being, social connections, sexuality, and stereotypes. The chapter concludes by considering how the shift toward singlehood is changing the way in which individuals organize their lives socially and economically. These changes are leading a cultural shift that is reconceptualizing the modern meaning of family and, in turn, allowing more people than ever to choose to stay single in the long term.
Diverse Friendships
Authors: Shelton J. Nicole , Turetsky Kate M. , Park Yeji , Eikenburg Lindsey
Published: January 2024

As the United States becomes increasingly diverse and technological advances afford greater contact with people beyond one’s local geography, people have more opportunities to befriend others who differ from them on various identities, including race/ethnicity, socioeconomic class, religion, and political ideology to name a few. This chapter, first, identifies structural and psychological processes that facilitate or hinder the formation and maintenance of cross-group friendships. Second, it synthesizes the benefits of cross-group friendship to intergroup attitudes, perceptions and beliefs, and physical and mental health. A major goal is to highlight asymmetries in these processes and outcomes for traditionally low- and high-status groups. Ideas for future research and interventions are discussed.
Relationships and Health
Authors: Moyer Anne , Mock K. Olivia , Martillotti Rose
Published: January 2024

The quantity, quality, and types of relationships as well as our level of embeddedness in social networks have been linked to morbidity and even mortality. More recent research has investigated the mechanisms through which these aspects of social life get “under the skin” to affect well-being. These range from health-related behaviors such as eating, exercise, smoking, and obtaining preventive healthcare to changes in the brain and gene expression, observed through techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), RNA sequencing, and gene arrays. This chapter highlights research related to how relationships with romantic partners, families, and friends translate to salutary and negative health outcomes. It also discusses contemporary themes relevant to the current social context.
Manufacturing Catastrophe
Authors: Nichols Shaun S.
Published: January 2024

Manufacturing Catastrophe explores the origins of industrial growth and decay in the United States through a study of the paradigmatic case of southeastern Massachusetts. American economic history has long been defined by the classic, waveform narrative of nineteenth-century industrialization, urbanization, and capitalist expansion followed by twentieth-century deindustrialization, globalization, and urban decay. Manufacturing Catastrophe, however, argues that this foundational mythology is deeply flawed. It shows that industrial Massachusetts did not simply “rise” and “fall,” but was made and re-made over and over again, beset by incessant waves of economic collapse and reconstruction. Tracing the successive rise and fall of the Massachusetts whaling, textile, garment, electronics, and high-tech industries over the past 200 years, it shows how Massachusetts business, labor, and political leaders repeatedly mobilized the lure of crisis itself—in everything from cheap labor and slashed tax rates to low rents and high manufacturing subsidies—to pull and push both capital and workers across the continents. Economic catastrophe was skilfully mobilized by business leaders and policymakers to shift the geography of global capitalism to rebuild shattered economies; it was, unexpectedly, a critical ingredient in the making of American industrial hegemony. To that end, Manufacturing Catastrophe suggests that the mad scramble for globally mobile capital—the so-called race to the bottom—is not some unique new problem that affluent nations alone face. As the Massachusetts case shows, it was part and parcel of the global spread of industrial capitalism, stretching back to the nineteenth century.
Cut from the Same Cloth
Authors: Nichols Shaun S.
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines how the desperation and working-class suffering left in the wake of the collapse of the Massachusetts textile industry in the 1930s was itself packaged, marketed, and ultimately exploited by local capitalists’ “development programs” in their efforts to again attract mobile capital to the area. As a result, just as textile mills were fleeing the Massachusetts seaboard en masse, they were replaced by a wave of equally mobile garment and electronics firms from cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Lured by promises of newly unemployed immigrant women willing to work for rock-bottom wages, generous funding packages from local elites desperate to see the economy revived, and a host of incentives from state leaders, ranging from free rent to tax clemency, these invading sweatshops turned local desperation into industrial development.
The “New” Economy
Authors: Nichols Shaun S.
Published: January 2024

Although stories of the American northeast in the 1970s and 1980s are often defined by deindustrialization, crisis, and rust-belt obsolescence, Massachusetts blazed a very different path. Boston-area capitalists leveraged the 1973 crisis into renewed commitments of state investment toward the creation of an entirely new economic regime: “high-tech” Massachusetts. As policy leaders attempted to reorient the educational infrastructure of Massachusetts to adapt to the needs of the “new economy,” workers followed suit. They trained for the coming onslaught of high-tech jobs. But, for South Coast Massachusetts, it was an onslaught that never came. Workers’ creeping realization that they had been trained for jobs that were never going to arrive set off a crashing wave of discontent. This working-class disenchantment would be a critical ingredient in the grinding decline of Massachusetts’s industrial cities in the late-twentieth century.
A seasonally programmed energy rheostat
Authors: Stevenson Tyler John
Published: January 2024

This chapter considers one simple overview of energy stability: the coordinated regulation of food intake (energy input) and expenditure (energy outflow). Most animals living in the temperate zone rely on seasonal changes in nutrient availability to develop sufficient stores of energy in the form of fat cells to survive seasons of drought and poor food availability. For most, an annual interval timer is used to anticipate future environments. Long-term interval timers are also used to govern regulated changes in energy stability across phases of nutrient abundance and paucity to maintain animal fitness across the year, and across multiple years for long-lived species.
The reactive response of life
Authors: Stevenson Tyler John
Published: January 2024

This chapter focuses on another type of reactive rheostasis, the well-defined, sequential regulated change in physiology that underlies gestation in mammals and brooding in birds. It shows that female energy balance during pregnancy is maintained through short-term homeostatic regulation of glucose, while the long-term change in insulin action is driven by the coordinated activity of an entirely separate genetic and anatomically driven response. These reactive rheostatic responses, unlike programmed rheostasis, have a defined period which can vary from a few weeks to several months. The chapter concludes that, given the considerable variation in parental physiology and behavior across the animal kingdom, it is hard, if not impossible, to formulate a single overarching model that can encompass the reactive rheostatic regulation of embryo development.
Hierarchical organization of physiological stability
Authors: Stevenson Tyler John
Published: January 2024

This chapter considers allostasis, in particular the control of glucocorticoid concentrations in the blood. It reviews the complex neural activity underlying individual differences in stress responses and places the hippocampus as the central node for allostasis. The chapter proposes a hierarchical organization of physiological stability to account for different levels of control over one physiological variable, glucocorticoid concentration in the circulatory system. It also reviews the difference between allostasis and rheostasis and the differing mechanisms of anticipation, which in rheostasis is a programmed event using inherited, genetic material, while the allostatic control of physiological responses is dependent on prior experience to the same, or similar environmental cues and requires an entirely separate set of brain regions.
Citizenship
Authors: Jacobson David , Cinalli Manlio
Published: January 2024

A paradox underlies Citizenship: The Third Revolution. Curiously, the importance of citizenship since its introduction some four thousand years ago in the Ancient Near East is only partly grasped. Ever since, citizenship has always been circumscribed by ascribed markers of status, such as slavery in Greece and Rome, the exclusion of women from civic life across millennia, and the discrimination against religious and racial minorities in nation-states. Understanding this paradox—the introduction of the revolutionary idea of humankind to shape its own destiny yet being unable to shed the harness of “primordialism”—is key. This book seeks, first, to reveal the underlying “grammar”—the principles—of citizenship. Why does citizenship emerge, historically, and why does it maintain traction, even if in compromised forms? Second, the book asks how we can move forward to revive citizenship and democracy. Historically, the book considers three revolutionary periods for citizenship: from the ancient and classical worlds, to the flourishing of guilds and city republics from 1000 CE, to the “unfinished revolution” of human rights from the post–World War II period. Building on emerging social developments, this book proposes a path forward toward repairing democracy, including laying open the foundations for a “twenty-first century guild.”
Introduction
Authors: Cinalli Manlio
Published: January 2024

This Introduction sets the historical context for the emergence of citizenship, the revolutionary periods in its evolution, and the underlying paradox that citizenship never fully overcomes primordialist practices. Six propositions shape the book’s exposition: the underlying “grammar” of citizenship; the paradoxical character of rights, which may undermine as well reinforce civic society; the role of interest and identity, respectively, in collective action; the importance of “social embeddedness” for the functioning of citizenship; the concept of seams as a better conceptual framing than borders in revealing the present global environment; and the increasingly evident empirical basis for prescribing a “twenty-first century guild” to help repair democracy.
The Second Revolution
Authors: Cinalli Manlio
Published: January 2024

In the mid-eleventh century, the Church, under Pope Gregory VII, sanctioned the “corporation”—a body based on civic principles rather than blood ties. This is a keyhole moment in what was an otherwise overwhelmingly kinship-based, feudal society, in which birth determined social status and political rule. New civic corporate bodies, notably guilds, communes, and the Italian city republics, eased the transition from the close personal bonds of the clan. Crucially, the guilds merged economic interests in the trades and crafts together with mutual aid, shared identity, and a broader political vision in their towns and cities. The corporation as a basis of association that transcended kinship was the seed of pivotal, long-term institutional developments regarding citizenship. Examples include religious associations that became, ironically, a basis for Protestant dissenters, business corporations like the Dutch East India Company, voluntary associations, and the nation-state itself.
A Twenty-First Century Guild
Authors: Cinalli Manlio
Published: January 2024

A guild model, adapted for the twenty-first century, is put forward as the basis for a more developed civic polity. A “second wave” in human rights is increasingly evident in the corporate sector, and comes under the rubric of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG). The developments include a gradual shift to stakeholder (as opposed to stockholder) principles. Building upon ESG developments, a prescriptive guild can address several concerns. It can provide an alternative pathway to political engagement, based on a model of “juridical democracy,” confronting distrust and shoring up the legitimacy of the state. Such a guild can thus serve as a nexus of citizenship. This includes choosing members, including those who are not yet citizens. Such a role for the corporation is especially germane now as the corporation is extraordinarily important in shaping people’s lives and the world itself, from the environment to human rights.
Force and Fraud in the World (and the Nine Circles of Hell)
Authors: Hunt Luke William
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores the universal role that force and fraud play in unjustified acts, in turn raising questions about the justification of a police institution enmeshed in deception and dishonesty. The chapter relies on empirical jurisprudence to introduce the concept of universalistic positive morality (UPM), which is based on the idea that societal issues regarding things such as brutality (force) and dishonesty (fraud) are grounded in positive (social) morality that is universalistic in character. Empirical evidence suggests that societies are oriented in a universalistic direction—in other words, they tend toward universal aims given empirical generalizations about human life and society. Accordingly, it should give us pause when our legal and political institutions—such as the police—depart from UPM.
Good Faith Policing
Authors: Hunt Luke William
Published: January 2024

This chapter draws on the norms of contract law—including good faith, honesty, and transparency—to illustrate how policing reaches beyond the value of security. Suppose a person is charged with a crime, and subsequently agrees to act on behalf of the police (to gather evidence, testify, or confess) in exchange for a (potentially) reduced sentence. If the person’s agreement is based on a material misrepresentation by the police, the person was subjected to a fraudulent bargaining process. More broadly, societal arrangements modeled on the ideal of a social contract (agreements between the government and the governed) are relational in nature even if they cannot be captured exhaustively in a literal contract. Persons are conceived as entrusting certain tasks (policing) to agents of the state, and it is through this entrustment that persons can be thought of as having a right to be secured in good faith.
The One Who Could See Stars
Authors: Conlan Thomas D.
Published: January 2024

This chapter reveals how Ōuchi Moriakira had the ability to defend his lands against an attack by Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, the powerful leader of Japan’s shogunate, and keep his people unified through religious rites and military success. It shows how he was able to profit from new modes of extraction of copper ore and expand trade with Korea, and at the same time emphasize his ethnicity through the renovation of tombs. Then it explores how Moriakira became a Zen monk and an important cultural patron and mediator. Finally, the chapter explains the process whereby national shrines were repurposed and possessed by the Ōuchi.
Ōuchi Masahiro and the Rise of Yamaguchi
Authors: Conlan Thomas D.
Published: January 2024

This chapter provides a new narrative of the debilitating Ōnin War (1465–78) and recasts the struggle as one for supremacy between the Ashikaga and the Ōuchi, revealing how the war ended with the next Ōuchi lord, Masahiro, abandoning his father’s warrior government, but receiving Ashikaga recognition of his extensive rites. Furthermore, it recounts the urban expansion of Yamaguchi and explores how it, rather than the capital of Kyoto, became the center of court-based rituals of governance. It then argues that the period is best characterized not as “Warring States” but rather a dual polity, with complementary political centers at Kyoto and Yamauguchi. Likewise, the chapter explains how they initiated economic regulations concerning coinage. After showing how Masahiro rewrote the Ōuchi past, recalibrating claims of ethnicity through forging records, the chapter explains how he patronized Shinto and deified his father as a god.
The Triumphs and Tragedy of Ōuchi Yoshitaka (1528–51)
Authors: Conlan Thomas D.
Published: January 2024

This chapter discusses the rise Ōuchi Yoshitaka, his destruction of long-standing rivals, consolidation of authority over the port of Hakata, and the islands of Tsushima, as well as his ability to contact directly to the courts of Japan and Korea through the post of Dazaifu Governor General (Dazai Daini). It also explains how his mines became the source of silver exports to the Ming. Finally, the chapter reveals an attempt to move Japan’s capital from Kyoto to Yamaguchi, and explains how these efforts spawned a coup d’état that resulted in his death, as well of that of many courtiers, the enervation of court rites, and the onset of Japan’s “Warring States” era in 1551.
Epilogue
Authors: Conlan Thomas D.
Published: January 2024

This chapter explains the turmoil accompanied the Ōuchi fall, and how numerous groups tried to gain control of the lucrative China and Korea trade. Furthermore, it recounts how the Mōri and Ōtomo fought for control of the Straits of Shimonoseki and provides a narrative of the rebellion of Ōuchi Teruhiro, which was the final attempt to restore Ōuchi rule. It then explains how Japan changed, and the earlier notion of Ōuchi becoming inconceivable. Finally, it recounts Ōuchi nostalgia, and explains how, for the finality of their collapse, the Ōuchi were too great to be forgotten entirely.
Introduction
Authors: Cavanaugh William T.
Published: January 2024

This introductory chapter outlines the argument of the book as a whole: everybody worships something, whether explicitly or implicitly. The biblical critique of idolatry acknowledges that people have a proclivity towards worshipping all sorts of things that are not God. Idolatry critique can be used sympathetically to narrow the gap between believers and nonbelievers. It can also be used critically to show how people become oppressed by their own creations. In both cases, the critique of idolatry questions the notion that the modern West is disenchanted and devoid of worship. The holy has not disappeared but has rather migrated to the market, the nation-state, and other supposedly “secular” realities.
Augustine on Idolatry as Self-Worship
Authors: Cavanaugh William T.
Published: January 2024

This chapter turns to Augustine for a Christian theological account of idolatry. For Augustine, idolatry is rooted in a kind of self-love, though one that paradoxically results in self-dissolution. The chapter examines Augustine’s analysis of the Roman creation of gods as a manifestation of self-love. It then considers Augustine’s attitude toward temporal things, showing that Augustine has sympathy for us material creatures who cling to material things both from delight at their beauty and from fatigue caused by the flux of time. The following section shows how Augustine regards idolatry as a kind of narcissism or self-worship, despite its appearance of worshiping an other. Autonomy becomes heteronomy, and self-love becomes domination by one’s own inventions. The final section considers Augustine’s view of material images. Augustine shares a suspicion of graven images, but allows for a nonidolatrous sacramental practice of images as they participate in the Image of God, Jesus Christ.
The Splendid Idolatry of Nationalism
Authors: Cavanaugh William T.
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores nationalism as idolatry dedicated to the service of something larger than the self but ultimately coming down to collective narcissism. Nationalism calls forth real virtues of self-sacrifice for ideals and people beyond the individual self, while simultaneously directing lethal levels of devotion toward what is not God. The chapter explores theories of nationalism as “religion.” It looks at theories about the origins of nationalism and argues that Western forms of nationalism appropriated the sacred from the old Christian order. The chapter gives a sympathetic account of the virtues of nationalism, but also explores the vices of nationalism, particularly collective narcissism, the worship of the collective “we,” which results in racism and the willingness to kill for the nation-state. Finally, the chapter considers whether there are other types of collective belonging compatible with the worship of God, exploring the biblical theme of the people of God.
Incarnation and Sacrament
Authors: Cavanaugh William T.
Published: January 2024

This chapter develops a nonidolatrous practice of the material world. It considers the question of sacramentality, the notion that divinity is found in creation, and argues that the question Which divinity? must be addressed. The chapter addresses that question with the Incarnation of God in Christ as an antidote to idolatry. The chapter considers Jean-Luc Marion’s contrast of the icon to the idol. While idols serve as mirrors to the self, the icon serves as a portal to participation in God. The chapter explores this theme in the practice of the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, acknowledging that there are idolatrous practices of the Eucharist. The Eucharist must be lived out in a way that counters idolatries like nationalism and consumerism. Idolatry can be healed only by encounter with the living God, especially in the unmanageable encounter with Christ in those who are marginalized by our idolatrous practices.
Is This God's Country?
Authors: Audi Robert
Published: January 2024

This book discusses how Christianity as a religion—or any religion—can coexist in harmony with democracy as an American ideal that separates church and state. The notion of a religion is complex and elastic; the notion of democracy is complex and contested. Both notions are described, and both are considered in contemporary America viewed through our founding documents, our ideals of religious liberty and social justice, and our acute day-to-day problems. Public education, business, and healthcare are all beset by the culture wars—from perceived hostility to religion in schools, to vaccine resistance, to refusing to provide religiously objectionable services, to abortion. The book reflects Audi’s decades of work on religion and politics, ethics, and philosophy of religion, but it’s written in plain language. It explains why America separates church and state, how this can benefit both religious and secular citizens, why there is nevertheless controversy about what this means, and how opposed religious and secular people can peaceably resolve differences. The main points are clarified by a multitude of cases spanning issues in schooling, doing business, and providing medical care. The book proposes standards for discussing and resolving these issues. Its final essay addresses the question whether, within those standards, America can be Christian—or religious at all—in a way that integrates religious liberty with democratic law-making and expands the common ground we need to overcome the cultural fragmentation that besets America.
Religion as an Engine of Law-Making
Authors: Audi Robert
Published: January 2024

Belonging to a religion that has an ethic—as is usual with full-blooded religions—inclines the faithful in the religion to want their culture, government, and laws to accord with their religiously approved ethical standards. The very same people who want this, however, would resist any pressures from some other religion to impose its standards by establishing its own pattern of laws or public policies. Our founders saw this and, in contrast with many European countries, built separation of church and state into the Constitution. This essay describes a range of constitutional and legal patterns and sets the stage for later essays which propose ways to balance religious sociopolitical aspirations with democratic tolerance.
Religion, Democracy, and Economic Liberty
Authors: Audi Robert
Published: January 2024

Private businesses may seem to deserve the same religious liberties as individuals; publicly traded businesses seem more like government agencies. Why should a private business have to serve people it religiously disapproves of? And should publicly traded businesses, as akin to government agencies and often claiming to serve the public good, separate church and state? What is publicly traded may still be privately (non-governmentally) owned. This essay describes the importance of both the religious freedoms of management and their responsibility for forthrightness about their business practices. Sensitivity to shareholder and stakeholder preferences are also relevant to religious conduct in business. These difficult issues are discussed in the light of both principles in the ethics of citizenship and the details of individual cases.
Can We Integrate Morality, Politics, and Religion?
Authors: Audi Robert
Published: January 2024

One cliché has it that politics and religion don’t mix, but the suggested rule doesn’t apply to democracy. This essay proposes standards for a good mix: for when and how one may appeal to religion in political discussion and law-making. Its aim is to encourage citizens making laws to use adequate reasons, with mutual respect, and, so far as possible, on common ground. This practice accommodates both stating and being inspired by religious convictions. The restraints on citizens are simply to have, in law-making that restricts liberty, an adequate basis in the kind of reason we normally share. A counterpart standard accommodates religious bases of judgment: religious people should consult the ethical standards of their own religion. Often, these standards support laws and policies justifiable on other grounds or even a non-religious basis.
Introduction
Authors: Plakias Alexandra
Published: January 2024

Awkwardness is a familiar fact of social life, but a less frequent subject of academic attention. This introduction begins by situating the study of awkwardness in relation to existing work in philosophy and psychology, and explains why awkwardness is relevant to contemporary work in ethics and social epistemology. Awkwardness, it’s suggested, functions as a kind of normative negative space, highlighting areas where our social resources fall short. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the book and its analysis of awkwardness as a social phenomenon involving feelings of discomfort, highlighting social dysfunction, and drawing attention to areas of social and moral life where norms fail to sufficiently guide us.
Feeling Awkward
Authors: Plakias Alexandra
Published: January 2024

This chapter explains how awkwardness differs from related phenomena, the self-conscious emotions of embarrassment and shame. It begins by looking at whether certain people might be immune to awkwardness and why, and discusses what this tells us about the psychology of awkward feelings. Specifically, it argues that experiencing awkwardness requires a certain capacity to see ourselves in relation to others. This in turn shows that awkwardness is related to forms of self-consciousness, yet the chapter argues that awkwardness is distinct from the so-called self-conscious emotions. It describes different theories of embarrassment and shows that recognizing awkwardness as distinct from embarrassment makes for a more unified explanation of the latter. It also compares awkwardness and anxiety, and concludes by saying more about the discomfort that characterizes feeling awkward, and how it differs from anxiety.
Awkward, Socially
Authors: Plakias Alexandra
Published: January 2024

This chapter moves from the aesthetics of awkwardness to the beginning of an argument for its social and epistemic significance. It starts by asking why people enjoy awkward comedy. Using Carroll’s discussion of the overlap between horror and comedy, it is suggested that awkward comedy is best understood as “social horror.” The chapter goes on to discuss reactions to real-life awkwardness in terms of its aesthetic qualities. It begins by looking at the appeal of effortless manners, which is explained in terms of social norms and cooperation. From there, the argument explores the idea that awkwardness is a way of marking insiders and outsiders; those in the know, and those out in the cold. In the second half of the chapter, this social explanation is elaborated upon to explain why awkwardness is a threat to social norms and accountability.
Evidence on Risk Preferences and the Role of Prospect Theory in Insurance
Authors: Nyman John A.
Published: January 2024

This chapter reviews the empirical evidence regarding the role of risk preferences in the demand for insurance and gambling, and then considers the empirical evidence in support of a quid pro quo approach to the demand for insurance. The first part summarizes the empirical evidence on risk preferences, and also describes prospect theory and the standard interpretation of this theory. Next, the chapter looks at the evidence from a series of empirical and theoretical studies to determine whether the standard interpretation is actually how prospect theory should be interpreted when applied to the demand for insurance. Finally, the chapter shows how the prospect theory diagram can be transformed into one that shows the demand for insurance under the quid pro quo theory.
Introduction
Authors: VanLaningham Erin
Published: January 2024

Educating for vocation has often focused on the individual’s purpose and meaning in connection with others. Students are encouraged to consider their talents and gifts in conjunction with community needs. Yet, when one considers what those needs of the world might be—what Frederick Buechner describes as the world’s “deep hunger”—then the framework for vocational understanding shifts. How can educators build a language of call that leads first to a consideration of what a good life looks like for others before we consider the good life for ourselves? Exploring vocation through the lens of social connectedness and deep friendship equips students to promote common goods and create more intentional pathways to purposeful living. This includes addressing injustice along with expanding our understanding of lived ecologies of vocation. When we orient vocation toward communal flourishing, higher education can leverage its purpose to contribute to civic society.
Overturning for the Common Good
Authors: Jeske Christine
Published: January 2024

This chapter suggests that teaching and learning about the common good must pay attention to the culturally ingrained narratives that shape our underlying assumptions about how to achieve good lives and vocational purpose. Using Willie James Jennings’s term “overturning,” the chapter suggests that teaching vocational discernment involves overturning certain dominant narratives and finding alternative narratives that enhance understanding of vocation for the common good. Specifically, the chapter explores how to move from overly relying on narratives proclaiming that “markets can fix it” and “merit makes me deserve it” toward narratives that affirm “I belong to memberships” and “mutuality makes life good.”
The Vocation of Advocacy
Authors: Hayford Michelle
Published: January 2024

This chapter argues that theatre and the college experience are not escapes from the real world, but instead platforms to practice advocacy, seek justice, and challenge oppressive structures. During the liminal college years, students engage in transforming the world as they are transformed by experiential learning in community. Students committed to a vocation of advocacy are answering a call to honor our interdependence by responding to injustice. Students can cultivate skill sets to be change agents and advocates in their field and on their vocational journeys through applied theatre practices. This chapter demonstrates that through applied theatre practices such as participatory dialogue, students are prepared to contribute to the common good and bring skills of transformative leadership to their work and lives. Specific examples come from the Common Good Players, an applied theatre troupe that devises creative scholarship that advocates for a more just world.
Queer Vocation and the Uncommon Good
Authors: Bateman Geoffrey W.
Published: January 2024

This chapter argues for the queering of both vocation and the common good. By articulating and troubling the normative structures of vocation and the common good, educators can facilitate the inclusive integration of issues and experiences most intimately connected to the lives of LGBTQIA+ people into vocational practices. The uncommon good—the whole range of communal resources and qualities that do not fit neatly into a universalized notion of the common good—has the potential to reveal the unique and sometimes transgressive differences that often adhere to our contemporary notions of queerness. The chapter argues that common work must be more attuned to and radically open to the uncommon differences that defy normative notions of the so-called good life. This openness to the uncommon will support queer students in their vocational discernment as they navigate the productive connection and tension between their desires and the common work of the world.
A Case for Compassionate Pedagogy
Authors: Slining Meghan M.
Published: January 2024

Those who feel called to protect the common good feel a sense of responsibility and often urgency to the importance of their work while experiencing some of the highest rates of burnout among professions. This chapter argues that discerning a call to care for the common good needs to be tended mindfully and educators have an important role in equipping and preparing students for sustainable vocational responsiveness. Extending lessons of interdependence from public health, the chapter proposes compassionate pedagogy as a framework for preparing students to care for the common good. By intentionally designing learning experiences and modeling compassion, educators can offer a counterpoint to the individualistic emphasis of education and vocational exploration. The chapter emphasizes the communal responsibility of educators to minimize burnout and engage in compassionate caring for students, for colleagues, and for themselves so that they may continue to nurture the common good.
The Yarn in the Tapestry
Authors: Dotterweich Martin Holt
Published: January 2024

Memory can weave individuals together with wider communities of the past and present and, in so doing, encourage understanding, love, and service. This chapter argues that memory opens the possibility to be faithful to facts, complexities, and ambiguities in historical record; teaching history with memory contributes to conceptions of, and the pursuit of, the common good. This approach to teaching memory finds connections not only among the dead but also among the living. When histories collide, memory allows for humility, conversation, and grace. While acknowledging the layers of trauma and hurt that have been done in the past, memory can lead people to an emphasis on the common good. When people are generous to the dead, they may find generosity to the living. When people hear other histories and weave them into their own experience, they find a sense of the common good and commonality through competing memories.
What We Are Up Against
Authors: Mathewes Charles
Published: January 2024

This chapter argues that educators’ core function is not learning but formation, superintending students’ process of becoming adults. That process explores a human’s dual experiences of freedom and obligation—of being both called to (inevitably particular) obligations and yet also empowered to become what one is not yet, yet might become. Higher education is a privileged site of disciplined reflection wherein these central challenges are articulated and responses to them explored. This process of “becoming an adult” never ends but unfolds across the whole life course; therefore, higher education’s “student body” properly includes everyone, age eighteen and up, who faces the perpetual challenges of being an adult. This means that higher education confronts one profound tension that stands at the center of human life. Making this the fundamental focus and thematic core of “higher education” as a whole provides opportunities for the transformative reconception of our vocations as humans and as educators.
Epilogue
Authors: VanLaningham Erin
Published: January 2024

Ecology—as applied to campuses, communities, and systems of thought—emphasizes the idea of a web that needs to be built and sustained so that all can flourish. The language of restoring, rebuilding, overturning, and serving means that in seeking the common good, our individual work contributes to a larger ecosystem that is complex, demanding, and, indeed, precarious. Courageous conversations, deep reflection, border crossing, reckoning with past traumas, and deliberate dialogue are all part of the building of the common good through vocational discernment. This concluding chapter emphasizes four aspects of our call to an ecology of the common good: deep ecology, ecology and economy, the home place, and community gardens and gardening. As we steward resources and gifts toward mutual benefit, educating for vocation can help us prioritize diversity, justice, and care for all.
The Elementality of Personhood in Early Buddhism
Authors: Robertson Matthew I.
Published: January 2024

This chapter discerns an early Buddhist theory of personhood as recorded in the Pāli Canon. Though Buddhist doctrine avows that, in truth, no person exists, Pāli sources indicate that persons are nevertheless to be understood according to their elemental composition and perceptual capabilities. The elemental examination of the person leads to insights into the fundamentally “not mine” character of elementality. The kasiṇa meditation, as described in the Cūḷasuññata Sutta, is analyzed and proposed as a key practice in the service of bringing about these insights, as well as the development of supernormal powers (iddhis) and enlightenment (nibbāna). The end result of the kasiṇa, involving the “empty” abiding of perceptual extensions (āyatanas), reveals enlightened personhood to be a matter of perceptual horizons, devoid of personal identification and attachment.
Persons in a Bewildered World
Authors: Robertson Matthew I.
Published: January 2024

Using a text historical approach, this chapter discerns several approaches to personhood in the pre-Classical era epic, the Mahābhārata. Personhood is earliest tied to concerns of manhood, virility, and sovereignty. These concerns evolve through the characterization of Kṛṣṇa, the divine and cosmically sovereign Person, whose sovereignty is dictated by the frameworks of Sāṃkhya and yoga. Human persons necessarily relate to Kṛṣṇa’s personhood by means of their elemental perception and their sensory and mental yoga, which furthermore determines the nature of their experience of the world. Typical persons are “bewildered,” meaning they are limited and imprecise in their perceptual awareness of the world. Fully realized persons, by contrast, having rectified their buddhi, recognize their inherent identity with the cosmic Person, and thereby behave in ways confluent with and supportive of the world-at-large.