bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Does Faith Work?
Authors: Unruh Heidi Rolland , Sider Ronald J.
Published: October 2005

Many supporters of faith-based initiatives claim that a religious approach is better at solving social problems. Without purporting to evaluate these claims, this chapter describes the ways Christian activists explain a link between faith and social efficacy, in the form of five postulates: Being faith-based expands social service program capacity; people of faith serve more effectively; a religious perspective enhances program content; spiritual conversion empowers beneficiaries to achieve socioeconomic goals; and church-based programs offer beneficiaries the support of the faith community. While ministry practitioners disagree whether faith is necessary to social outcomes, seldom do they claim it is sufficient. The potential of faith-based approaches may be limited by a disconnect between the ideals of religious practitioners and actual praxis.
Social Capital and Spiritual Capital
Authors: Unruh Heidi Rolland , Sider Ronald J.
Published: October 2005

Congregations represent a significant source of energy for social action because of their unique capacity to mobilize a constituent network for collective ends. Congregations translate their social capital into public good by sponsoring organized action, by empowering the civic involvement of members, by sharing resources within the congregation's relational network, and by harnessing religious cultural capital to social concerns. An evangelistic mission may strengthen a church's social capital, particularly if the church adopts a relational, holistic mission orientation, sharing its faith both in word and deed. This potential may be limited, however, by the challenges of connecting with people across racial, cultural or socioeconomic class lines, and by the lack of a social vision.
Conclusion
Authors: Unruh Heidi Rolland , Sider Ronald J.
Published: October 2005

Research on the “faith factor” in solving social problems should take into account the complexity of the religious dynamics of social action. More nuanced understandings of the role of religion in public life are needed for accurate assessments of the risks and rewards of faith-based initiatives—shifting the focus from whether to how government should partner with faith-based social services. Well-crafted public policy can expand the civic contributions of religious groups with a public mission to serve society. As some Christians emphasize social service as a vehicle for evangelism, it is important to learn whether conversionist, socially engaged churches represent a growing movement. The “both-and” paradigm of a holistic mission orientation bridges the conservative-liberal dualism that has long characterized American Protestantism.
How to Invest in Social Capital
Authors: Prusak Laurence , Cohen Don
Published: October 2005

This chapter presents an overview of many of the issues that organizations face in creating and maintaining social capital. The things that managers can do to encourage connections among their people and enable trust to flourish are discussed. These include making connections, enabling trust, fostering cooperation, and authenticity in management.
Fast Friends—Virtuality and Social Capital
Authors: Lesser Eric L. , Cothrel Joseph
Published: October 2005

This chapter surveys the current thinking on social capital, with an eye to the challenges organizations face in promoting its creation and preservation. It explores the ways virtual communication technologies help address these challenges, while introducing new challenges of their own. A case from Ace Hardware Company is presented as an example of how companies are using virtual technologies to create, maintain, and exploit their social capital.
Trust and Knowledge Sharing: A Critical Combination
Authors: Levin Daniel Z. , Cross Rob , Abrams Lisa C. , Lesser Eric L.
Published: October 2005

This chapter focuses on the importance of trust in supporting effective knowledge sharing, highlighting the importance of both competence and benevolence in developing trustworthy relationships with others. It discusses a survey of 138 employees from three companies: a division from a US pharmaceutical company, a division of a British bank, and a large group within a Canadian oil and gas company. All three groups were composed of people engaged in knowledge-intensive work. Respondents were asked to consider a recent project they had worked on, and to rate the usefulness of the knowledge they received from those whom they had sought out advice on that project. The results of the survey, which were similar across the three companies, identified some actionable recommendations for companies looking to share knowledge more effectively across their organizations.
Knowing What We Know: Supporting Knowledge Creation and Sharing in Social Networks
Authors: Cross Rob , Parker Andrew , Prusak Laurence , Borgatti Stephen P.
Published: October 2005

This chapter focuses on how four important drivers — awareness, access, engagement, and safety — influence how knowledge travels across informal networks. It describes a research program to determine the means for improving employees' ability to create and share knowledge in important social networks. In the first phase of the research, characteristics of relationships that forty managers relied on for learning and knowledge sharing in important projects were assessed. In the second phase, social network analysis was employed to map these dimensions of relationships among strategically important networks of people in various organizations. Working with a consortium of Fortune 500 companies and government organizations, empirical support for relational characteristics that facilitate knowledge creation and sharing in social networks was developed as well as insight into social and technical interventions to facilitate knowledge flow in these networks.
Making Invisible Work Visible: Using Social Network Analysis to Support Strategic Collaboration
Authors: Cross Rob , Borgatti Stephen P. , Parker Andrew
Published: October 2005

This chapter examines how social network analysis can be used as a diagnostic technique for better understanding myriad organizational challenges, ranging from improving communication between functional organizations to identifying key knowledge-sharing roles and responsibilities. A research program is described that aims to determine how organizations can better support work occurring in informal networks of employees. Working with a consortium of Fortune 500 companies and government agencies, collaboration and work in over forty informal networks from twenty-three different organizations was assessed. In all cases, the networks studied provided strategic and operational value to the embedding organization by enabling employees to effectively collaborate and integrate disparate expertise.
Communities of Practice and Organizational Performance
Authors: Lesser Eric L. , Storck John
Published: October 2005

This chapter explains how communities of practice play a critical role in the development of social capital, providing employees with the opportunity to expand their connections, develop relationships, and establish common norms and values that can lead to improved knowledge transfer. It describes a study of seven companies in which communities of practice are acknowledged to be creating value. For each of the companies that participated in the study, between five and ten members of existing communities of practice were interviewed regarding their perceptions of value at both an individual and organizational level. The research team then developed a “mind map” which led to the categorization scheme used to review the interview transcripts. From the categories, the key sources of individual and organizational value were abstracted.
Learning from the Connected Customer: Enhancing Customer Web Sites with Community
Authors: Lesser Eric L. , Fontaine Michael A.
Published: October 2005

This chapter extends the notion of community to include customers. It focuses on how organizations are bringing together informal groups of customers via the Internet to exchange knowledge, build brand loyalty, and provide unique insights into product design and use. The components of a customer community space and King Arthur Flour's creation of its online customer community — the Baking Circle — are discussed.
Leveraging Knowledge Management across Strategic Alliances
Authors: Parise Salvatore , Sasson Lisa
Published: October 2005

This chapter highlights how firms can apply knowledge management tools and techniques to identify potential alliance partners, negotiate successful arrangements, and more effectively maintain ongoing partnerships. Strategic alliances, the application of knowledge management solutions, and the building blocks of alliance management are discussed.
Using Mentoring and Storytelling to Transfer Knowledge in the Workplace
Authors: Swap Walter , Leonard Dorothy , Shields Mini , Abrams Lisa C.
Published: October 2005

This chapter examines the use of mentoring and storytelling in the context of venture capitalists sharing important learning with newly minted entrepreneurs. It argues that managerial influence over the transfer of knowledge assets depends upon understanding how individuals within and across organizations informally teach and learn.
Narrative Patterns: The Perils and Possibilities of Using Story in Organizations
Authors: Snowden David J.
Published: October 2005

Narrative techniques reveal the patterns of an organization and are in turn the means by which it can be patterned. Narrative is a powerful tool within organizations, but it is not susceptible to the engineering approaches that have dominated management practice in the last few decades. This chapter presents some cautionary comments and an overview of some of the newly developing areas of narrative work. It reflects the experience of the Institute for Knowledge Management and, more recently, the Cynefin Centre for Organizational Complexity in developing and patenting methods, tools, and techniques for narrative work in organizations.
Coming to the Edge of the Circle
Authors: Bado-Fralick Nikki
Published: October 2005

This book offers an ethnographic study of the initiation ritual practiced by one coven of Witches located in Ohio. As a High Priestess within the coven as well as a scholar of religion, the author of this book is in a unique position to contribute to our understanding of this ceremony and the tradition to which it belongs. The book's analysis of this coven's initiation ceremony offers an important challenge to the commonly accepted model of “rites of passage.” Rather than a single linear event, initiation is deeply embedded within a total process of becoming a Witch in practice and in community with others. This book expands our concept of initiation while giving us insight into one coven's practice of Wicca and introduces readers to the contemporary nature religion variously called Wicca, Witchcraft, the Old Religion, or the Craft.
Dancing between Binary Poles
Authors: Bado-Fralick Nikki
Published: October 2005

This chapter presents the author's thoughts about Wicca and philosophy. The chapter talks about the author's initiation into the Craft, the insider/outsider dichotomy, and her study of religion and philosophy. The author believes that philosophy is not exactly a particular thing, a discrete disciplinary subject in a course of study at the university. Rather, philosophy is itself a doing, a practice, a temperament, an engaging of oneself with the world, a way of living in the world, a way of asking questions, a deep curiosity about the ways we are and why.
Stumbling toward Wisdom
Authors: Bado-Fralick Nikki
Published: October 2005

This chapter begins with the author's account of her introduction to the Craft. It then discusses deities, the coming of the “Jahweh-in-Drag”, coven structure and organization, ritual, text and authority.
The Merry Circle
Authors: Bado-Fralick Nikki
Published: October 2005

This chapter introduces the author's coven and describes its basic ritual patterns. The author established her coven, called the Merry Circle, in 1984. The Merry Circle is composed of six Priestesses and two Priests. The Merry Circle usually performs its group rituals at night and, whenever possible, outdoors in nature. Formal group rituals are held in a specially prepared space called the Circle. The Circle is often marked off from the space around it by a ring of stones (if outdoors), a ring of red yarn (if indoors), or some other distinctive marking determined by the creativity of the individual Witch. The four directions — north, east, south, and west — are plotted as accurately as possible using a compass and then marked by specially blessed and prepared candles that are used in the ceremony.
The Path toward the Circle
Authors: Bado-Fralick Nikki
Published: October 2005

This chapter focuses on the initiation of the path towards Wicca. Topics covered include the recruitment of new members, public education and outreach, teaching the craft to those interested in joining a coven, the skills and expertise needed by Wiccan practitioners to teach, the process of learning Wicca, hands-on practice, and ending the introductory class.
Coming to the Edge of the Circle
Authors: Bado-Fralick Nikki
Published: October 2005

This chapter focuses on the Dedicant's initiation. It discusses the screening process for potential Dedicants and the actual rite of initiation. An analysis of how the initiation ceremony continues some of theological and practical groundwork begun with the Rite of Dedication is presented.
Concluding Remarks
Authors: Bado-Fralick Nikki
Published: October 2005

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. It begins with an assessment of reflexivity as a nontraditional methodology for religious studies scholarship. It then talks about the implications of the author's religious practice for new models and ways of scholarship investigation concerning religion.
Epilogue
Authors: Bado-Fralick Nikki
Published: October 2005

This short epilogue talks about the changes that have come to the Merry Circle. The Merry Circle no longer exists as a single practicing group, because some of its members either have already relocated or will relocate so far from one another geographically. This chapter talks about the last meeting between the four High Priestesses, and how it gave the author the strength to complete this book.
Investiture
Authors: Datta Michael Madhusudan
Published: October 2005

This chapter presents an English translation of the first canto of Michael Madhusudan Datta's epic poem The Slaying of Meghanada.
Weapons Acquisition
Authors: Datta Michael Madhusudan
Published: October 2005

This chapter presents an English translation of the second canto of Michael Madhusudan Datta's epic poem The Slaying of Meghanada.
Reuniting
Authors: Datta Michael Madhusudan
Published: October 2005

This chapter presents an English translation of the third canto of Michael Madhusudan Datta's epic poem The Slaying of Meghanada.
Ashoka Grove
Authors: Datta Michael Madhusudan
Published: October 2005

This chapter presents an English translation of the fourth canto of Michael Madhusudan Datta's epic poem The Slaying of Meghanada.
Felling with the Shakti Weapon
Authors: Datta Michael Madhusudan
Published: October 2005

This chapter presents an English translation of the seventh canto of Michael Madhusudan Datta's epic poem The Slaying of Meghanada.
Funeral Rites
Authors: Datta Michael Madhusudan
Published: October 2005

This chapter presents an English translation of the ninth canto of Michael Madhusudan Datta's epic poem The Slaying of Meghanada.
The Changing Face of Christianity
Authors: Sanneh Lamin
Published: October 2005

This essay provides the global context for the local studies that follow: the emergence of Christianity as a world religion, its rising prominence in the global south and east and its waning influence and adherence in the North Atlantic region. Sanneh highlights the cultural repositioning of African Christianity and Asian Christianity away from their old intellectual and political cradle in Europe. These new forms of “world Christianity” are expressed in more languages, cultural traditions and models of faith and practice than ever before, and they are engaged in a growing cultural conflict with European Christianity and its expressions in North America. This interdisciplinary study shows that expounding the story of world Christianity requires new combinations of scholarly skills and experience.
Religion Bridge: Translating Secular into Sacred Music
Authors: Harkins-Pierre Patricia
Published: October 2005

This chapter examines new Christian literary and musical styles arising in the U.S. Virgin Islands and the eastern Caribbean more generally. The islands’ struggles with colonialism, slavery, freedom, migration, and dependency have provoked a gospel response in drama, music, and preaching. These new expressions depict Jesus as a person of color and the Christian as a radical soldier, a gospel music knight errant armed with Bible, drums, and guitar. A new Christian people’s idiom is emerging at a global crossroads.
Culture, Christianity, and Witchcraft in a West African Context
Authors: Vanden Berg Todd M.
Published: October 2005

This chapter describes the changing terms upon which the Longuda people of northeast Nigeria engage their beliefs about witchcraft. Lutheran and other forms of Christianity have wide influence in the region, but despite missionaries’ dismissals, belief in witchcraft persists. Using the tools of theology, comparative religions, and anthropology, the author shows how Longuda Christians are adapting and synthesizing a traditional worldview and Christian doctrines to make sense of the forces they encounter. Vanden Berg shows that anthropological and theological assumptions about syncretism, non-negotiable worldviews, and truth claims need revising in the face of the Longuda people’s Christian embrace of a spiritually animated world.
A View of Ghana's New Christianity
Authors: Gifford Paul
Published: October 2005

This chapter observes and interprets new forms of independent Pentecostal Christianity emerging in Ghana, West Africa. The new churches emphasize faith healing, a prosperity gospel, and deliverance from demons. Some of the pastors have become prominent on local media outlets with their own television and radio programs, and in some cases, broadcasting stations. One group established a private university. These groups compete and contend with more traditional churches, but some have begun to shift toward more classically Christian approaches to social ministry and personal spirituality. The current popularity of prosperity gospel teaching suggests that materialism and an instrumental approach to religion may be integral to African traditional values and worldviews.
The Role of Churches in the Peace Process in Africa
Authors: van Butselaar G. Jan
Published: October 2005

This chapter recounts the early development of Christianity in Mozambique as a Portuguese colony with a strong Roman Catholic influence. The Marxist Frelimo regime in newly independent Mozambique denounced Christianity as a colonial, antirevolutionary force, confiscated its institutions, and suppressed its practice. Yet the local churches continued to play a significant local role as civil war broke out and people came to them for help and shelter. Both Catholic and Protestant communities played roles in the peace negotiations, but the Catholics had the resources and the ties to the Renamo rebel forces to lend some diplomatic leverage. After the peace agreement, churches played a major role in bringing reconciliation to fractured communities. The chapter ends with brief comparisons to the conflicts in South Africa and Rwanda and concludes that while in each case Christian denominations and ecumenical groups had little effect on effecting justice, peace, and reconciliation, individual Christian leaders and local ministries played powerful roles.
Interpreting Karen Christianity
Authors: Case Jay Riley
Published: October 2005

This chapter recounts American Baptist missionaries’ and church leaders’ responses in the mid-nineteenth century to the Christian conversion of the Karen people, a tribal group in Burma. Christianity preceded civilization among the Karen people, and their culture appeared to be more hospitable to Christianity than the “higher” civilization of the dominant Burmese. The Karen people apparently did not have to become westerners to be good Christians. This news made little sense back in the United States, where western hierarchical notions of society had no place for Christianity flourishing in so-called primitive cultures. Moral philosopher Francis Wayland reconciled these facts to American Baptists’ populist and democratic ideas about the ability of ordinary people to understand God’s truth and organize churches. Yet the idea that Asian Christianity need not adopt western civilization made little headway in mission theory for decades thereafter.
Missionary Thinking about Religious Plurality at Tambaram 1938
Authors: Plantinga Richard J.
Published: October 2005

This chapter examines the thought of Hendrik Kraemer, a Dutch neo-orthodox theologian, well-versed in Islam, who had served as a missionary to Indonesia. Kraemer was commissioned by the International Missionary Council (IMC) to write a definitive Christian theology regarding other world religions, to be discussed at the IMC’s great international missionary conference in Tambaram, near Madras, India, in 1938. Kraemer’s book, The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World (1938), insisted that there is no salvation to be found outside of the redemptive work of Jesus Christ. For the next half-century, Kraemer’s work was the starting point for ongoing debates over a Christian theology of religion and interfaith dialogue. Plantinga argues that a proper Christian view of non-Christian religions must give more recognition of continuity in God’s revelation, but it does well to insist, as Kraemer did, on salvation only through God alone, in Jesus Christ.
Contextual Theology
Authors: Shenk Wilbert R.
Published: October 2005

In this chapter, Shenk shows how the postcolonial climate growing immediately before and after World War II prompted new self-criticism and theological reflection among western missionaries and among the leaders of newer non-western Christian churches. Nowhere was this more true than in China and the post-1949 Chinese diaspora, as Chinese Christian leaders were under pressure to show that Christianity was not merely a western import but could engender profound and original thinking out of a Chinese cultural context. A key figure in the Chinese and pan-Asian attempts to reconceptualize Christian theology was Shoki Coe (before 1966, known as C. H. Hwang), a leader of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan. Coe developed what he called a contextual theology, which was meant, in postcolonial times, to free churches from western cultural baggage and rethink the mission of the local church in own cultural context. This theological quest for authentic local expressions of the Christian faith spread rapidly across the global south and east, and has begun to have an effect in the mission theology of the global north as well, where some Christian thinkers are reasserting a missionary stance for the church in a post-Christian culture.
Conclusion
Authors: Sanneh Lamin
Published: October 2005

Beginning with a brief look at the controversy in the worldwide Anglican communion over the northern churches’ attempts to normalize homosexual relationships, editor Sanneh insists that this conflict is evidence of a serious cultural gap between the northern churches and those of the global south and east. Northern forms of Christianity are trying to regain a hearing by becoming deeply accommodated to the demands of post-Christian culture, while after decades of hardship and persecution (e.g., in Ethiopia under the Dirge, a Marxist regime), non-western Christianity is emerging more vigorous and self-confident than ever. A fault line on a global scale is emerging, but because of massive emigration, world Christianity is present everywhere. Non-western or world Christianity has grown up amid the failure of nation-states and economies and has learned to carry much civic freight. It is better equipped than the northern churches to function in a new world order where state jurisdiction is less relevant. These new expressions of Christianity are opening up a new chapter in the history of religion.
Burdened Virtues
Authors: Tessman Lisa
Published: October 2005

Lisa Tessman’s Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles engages questions central to feminist theory and practice, from the perspective of Aristotelian ethics. Focused primarily on selves who endure and resist oppression, the book addresses the ways in which the devastating conditions confronted by these selves both limit and burden their moral goodness, and affect their possibilities for flourishing. The book describes two different forms of “moral trouble” prevalent under oppression. The first is that the oppressed self may be morally damaged, prevented from developing or exercising some of the virtues; the second is that the very conditions of oppression require the oppressed to develop a set of virtues that carry a moral cost to those who practice them, and that are referred to as “burdened virtues.” These virtues have the unusual feature of being disjoined from their bearer’s own well being. It is suggested that eudaimonistic theories should be able to account for virtues of this sort.
Regretting the Self One Is
Authors: Tessman Lisa
Published: October 2005

This chapter examines a practice known by feminists as the politics of personal transformation, a practice that has attempted to respond critically to the fact that selves have been morally damaged under oppression. This practice recognizes that participants in social justice movements must remake their own desires or inclinations so that they better reflect the commitments of the movement. While feminists such as Claudia Card have used the concept of moral luck to characterize oppression and its resulting moral damage as a matter of systemically patterned bad luck, this chapter points out that luck also has an impact on the possibilities of transforming one’s own character in the context of political resistance, so that one may be unable to alter one’s own problematic character traits. Given such luck, one may end up experiencing what Bernard Williams has called “agent-regret,” an attitude that one can have toward what one would not have chosen, but came to enact anyway precisely because of one’s own lack of control. Experiencing this discomforting agent-regret about one’s own character—as well as experiencing anger at the systemic forces that ingrained objectionable values into one’s self—is appropriate, and yet the very need for a self-reflective attitude that is so disturbing should be considered a harm.
The Ordinary Vices of Domination
Authors: Tessman Lisa
Published: October 2005

Virtue ethics seems to present a puzzle about the privileged: If moral virtue is necessary for flourishing (which is a core assumption of virtue ethics), then members of privileged groups can only flourish if they are morally good, but it is more plausible to conceive of the privileged as morally deficient than as morally good, since their privileges result from unjust social positions. Thus it appears that they are barred from flourishing, which is odd since one would expect conditions of oppression to prevent the victims rather than the beneficiaries of these conditions from living the good life. The puzzle begins to dissolve when one distinguishes between the contemporary understanding of happiness and the ancient Greek conception of flourishing, for it turns out that privileged people can be said to be happy without granting that they flourish. The distinction helps uncover a key assumption of interdependence behind the belief that even the so-called other-regarding virtues (and not just self-regarding virtues) are necessary for one’s own flourishing; if people are interdependent in such a way that the flourishing of one is tied to the flourishing of all, then for the privileged to flourish they would have to worry a lot more about the well-being of the disadvantaged. This suggests a critical revision to Aristotle’s eudaimonistic theory, by the addition of the claim that a trait that contributes to one’s own well-being cannot count as morally praiseworthy if it detracts from the flourishing of an inclusive social collectivity.
Between Indifference and Anguish
Authors: Tessman Lisa
Published: October 2005

This chapter begins with a search for a praiseworthy trait in the realm of sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering, a trait that ought to lie somewhere between the poles of indifference and anguish (and that those who are confident that there is such a praiseworthy trait tend to call “compassion”). Because of the very enormity of unjust suffering in the world, every possible level of sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering is at once too indifferent (for one always turns one’s back on so many) and too anguished (by the pain of those to whom one does attend). Even if one can determine a “best” disposition to have and make the right decisions regarding which actions to take in the face of all this suffering, one still leaves strong moral demands unsatisfied. The resultant moral remainder (in the form of regret and guilt at what one cannot do) burdens the moral agent, and what one can successfully do in the way of being attuned to others’ suffering is burdensome too, for such sensitivity, even in moderation, is intrinsically painful. Thus even the best possible trait to have turns out to be a “burdened virtue.”
The Burden of Political Resistance
Authors: Tessman Lisa
Published: October 2005

This chapter examines the way that liberatory movements—including both feminist movements and Black liberation movements—offer praise for their best members, holding them up to model the character traits that enable political resistance. This praise appears strange given a eudaimonistic ethics in which character traits that are morally praiseworthy are usually conducive to or constitutive of flourishing, for the character traits recommended for resistance often disable resisters themselves from flourishing. Based on Aristotle’s discussion of “mixed actions,” a description is given of the political resister as displaying “mixed traits” that are routinely unlinked from flourishing and thereby burdened. The problematic traits of the politically resistant self include those such as anger that contribute to maintaining a hard resolve against the oppressors, those such as courage that help resisters take risks and accept loss and sacrifice, and those that resisters must display in their relationships with one another, such as loyalty coupled with an openness to criticism and self-criticism. The chapter includes an extended analysis of one of these questionable virtues, namely anger.
Dangerous Loyalties
Authors: Tessman Lisa
Published: October 2005

This chapter suggests that not only might a loyal disposition be detrimental for the one who is loyal, but it may actually turn out not to truly support liberatory ends. In order for group loyalty to even be available as a virtue, there must be a worthy object of loyalty. While feminist communities and communities that ground liberatory racial movements are potential objects of group loyalty, loyalty forbids doing anything aimed at undermining the existence of the object of loyalty. Because liberatory principles sometimes do indeed call for dissolving the identities to which one might have allegiances, there may be no morally acceptable opportunities for group loyalty for a political resister. Political resisters who do sustain loyalty to a community by accepting the challenge of being a loyal critic may become burdened in several ways: they may find themselves tied to a community whose practices reflect internal dynamics of dominance and subordination, and they may belong to the community only uncomfortably, for their critical activities will tend to alienate them from other community members.
Conclusion
Authors: Tessman Lisa
Published: October 2005

The conclusion addresses a question that emerges given all of the critical revisions to a eudaimonistic virtue ethics that are suggested in the course of the book, and especially given the proposed addition of an odd category of virtues—burdened virtues—that lack the usual feature of virtues because they are exercised in contexts in which flourishing tends to be diminished or unattainable. The conclusion considers how one could identify the virtues under conditions in which the link between virtue and flourishing is so unreliable. Given that the burdened virtues tend to fail to enable their bearers to flourish, one cannot find these virtues simply by beginning with a conception of flourishing and then working backwards from there to see which traits are conducive to or constitutive of such flourishing. What is proposed instead is a variety of ways in which a trait, despite being costly or detrimental, could be otherwise identifiably praiseworthy.
Soul Searching
Authors: Smith Christian , Denton Melinda Lundquist
Published: October 2005

This book aims to provide new insights on the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers. It presents the main findings of the National Study of Youth and Religion, a research project on the religious and spiritual lives of American adolescents conducted at the University of North Carolina from 2001 to 2005. The survey captured a broad range of differences among U.S. teens in religion, age, race, sex, socioeconomic status, rural-suburban-urban residence, region of the country, and language spoken. The book provides answers to questions about the character of teenage religion, the extent of spiritual seeking among youth, how religion affects adolescent moral reasoning and risk behaviors, and much more. It is hoped that by informing readers about the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers, it will help foster discussions in families, religious congregations, community organizations, and beyond, not only about the general state of religion in the United States, but also about cultural and institutional practices that may better serve and care for American teens.
Introduction
Authors: Smith Christian , Denton Melinda Lundquist
Published: October 2005

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the lack of attention given to the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers. It then provides a brief description of the National Study of Youth and Religion, a research project on the religious and spiritual lives of American adolescents conducted at the University of North Carolina from 2001 to 2005. This is followed by an overview of the chapters included in this volume.
American Adolescent Religion in Social Context
Authors: Smith Christian , Denton Melinda Lundquist
Published: October 2005

This chapter explores some of the major social forces and factors that shape the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers. It is argued that understanding the religion and spirituality of contemporary American adolescents means framing that understanding within the larger social and institutional contexts of therapeutic individualism, mass-consumer capitalism, the digital communication revolution, residual positivism and empiricism, the structural disconnect of teenagers from the world of adults, the problems of adults, and other relevant cultural contradictions that may affect the religious and spiritual lives of contemporary youth. This is not because youth are normally consciously aware of or articulate about these big-picture social influences, but because these larger contexts are objective, structural, institutional, and cultural realities that powerfully form youth’s lives.
Adolescent Religion and Life Outcomes
Authors: Smith Christian , Denton Melinda Lundquist
Published: October 2005

This chapter explores the associations between religiosity and youth outcomes. It addresses the question of causality and selection effects, seeking to clarify whether and to what extent religiosity is associated with more positive adolescent life outcomes. It is shown that religious faith and practice can and does shape teenagers’ lives in positive and constructive ways. The story of Antwan, a 16-year-old African American Southern California boy, helps illustrate this point. His religion provides him with moral directives by which he has learned to negotiate his life in largely helpful ways.
Conclusion
Authors: Smith Christian , Denton Melinda Lundquist
Published: October 2005

The concluding chapter summarizes and elaborates the findings in this volume. Some recurrent themes have emerged from the analyses in this book. Among these is that religion has a significant presence in the lives of many U.S. teens today. Most U.S. teens are content to follow their parents’ religious footsteps, and most feel quite positive about religion. The religiodemographic diversity represented by U.S. adolescents is no more varied today than it has been for a very long time.
Weighing Lives
Authors: Broome John
Published: October 2005

People are often faced with decisions that involve weighing the lives of some people against the lives of others, or weighing lives against other goods. This book aims to develop a moral theory that can help with making these practical decisions. It is a theory of value, which includes an account of how good it is to extend a person’s life, and also an account of how good it is to have new lives in the world — of the value of adding a new person to the world’s population. It is a theory about the aggregation of people’s wellbeing: of how the wellbeing that comes to a person at different times in her life comes together to determine the overall value of her life, and of how different people’s wellbeing comes together to determine the overall value of the world. The book pays particular attention to the common intuition that adding people to the population is ethically neutral, but eventually rejects it. The book’s conclusion is a version of utilitarianism. The method is formal, but the presentation is as informal as possible.
Weighing Lives
Authors: Broome John
Published: October 2005

This chapter presents examples of the practical problem of weighing lives, from medicine, global warming and elsewhere. It also sets out in general terms the theoretical problem that the book will tackle. The problem is to evaluate distributions of wellbeing, in which wellbeing is distributed across people, across time, and (when there is uncertainty) across states of nature.
Some Technical Matters
Authors: Broome John
Published: October 2005

This chapter presents in a more formal way the problem the book will tackle. It introduces the idea of a betterness ordering for distributions of wellbeing, and describes some of its formal properties. It describes how this ordering can be represented by a value function, which measures the goodness of a distribution. It explains the idea of an ordinal representation.
Right and Good
Authors: Broome John
Published: October 2005

This chapter considers how far what one ought to do when facing a decision of life and death is determined by the goodness of the distribution that will result. It defines, examines and assesses the principles of teleology and consequentialism in ethics. It compares normative theory with axiology. It considers how far a person’s lifetime wellbeing depends on all the wellbeing that comes to the person at times within her life, and how far the goodness of the world depends on the wellbeing of the people. It introduces the idea of pattern goods such as equality and longevity.
Features of Goodness
Authors: Broome John
Published: October 2005

This chapter discusses three debated features of goodness. It argues that the relation of betterness is necessarily transitive. It compares the ideas of goodness overall, goodness for a person, and goodness for a person at a time. It considers whether goodness must always be relative to a standpoint, and whether it is necessarily impartial.
Quantities of Temporal Wellbeing
Authors: Broome John
Published: October 2005

This chapter defines a quantitative notion of a person’s temporal wellbeing (her wellbeing at a time). It uses the same methods as the previous chapter. It gives an account of intertemporal comparisons of wellbeing. It also defines a zero for temporal wellbeing.
Separability of Times
Authors: Broome John
Published: October 2005

This chapter starts to consider how wellbeing can be aggregated across a distribution. It describes two possible route to aggregation, called ‘the people route’ and the ‘snapshot route’. Each relies on a particular assumption of separability, which the chapter explains. The chapter examines the credibility of separability of times. It shows how separability of times conflicts with the value of longevity, and concludes that this principle cannot be relied on. It therefore rejects the snapshot route to aggregation.
Separability of Lives
Authors: Broome John
Published: October 2005

This chapter distinguishes a notion of separability of lives from a stronger notion of separability of people, which takes into account the possibility of a person’s nonexistence. It defends separability of lives on the basis of the principle of personal good. It thereby opens up the people route to aggregation when the population of the world is constant. It assesses the principle of personal good, particularly considering its relation to the value of equality and its conflict with discounting for time.
The Neutral Level for Existence
Authors: Broome John
Published: October 2005

This chapter demonstrates how the assumptions made so far in the book imply that there is a single neutral level for existence. That is, there is a single level of wellbeing such that adding a person at that level is neither better nor worse than not adding her. It explains how this conclusion conflicts strongly with an intuition shared by many people: the ‘neutrality intuition’ that adding a person to the world’s population is generally ethically neutral. It uses examples such as the mere addition paradox. It outlines various ways in which the conflict with intuition might be circumvented.
Nonstandard Betterness
Authors: Broome John
Published: October 2005

This chapter considers and rejects three approaches to incorporating the neutrality intuition into a theory of value. The first is to suppose that betterness might be intransitive. The second is to suppose that betterness might be conditional in a particular sense. The third is to suppose that betterness can only be understood relative to a particular population.
Indeterminate Betterness
Authors: Broome John
Published: October 2005

This chapter gives qualified support to a fourth approach to incorporating the neutrality intuition. It considers the possibility that the betterness relation is indeterminate, but in the end supports the related but different view that betterness is vague. It adopts the supervaluation account of vagueness, which opens the way to continuing the development of the theory of weighing lives.
Separability of People
Authors: Broome John
Published: October 2005

This chapter defends the separability of people. It explains that people will be separable if and only if the neutral level for existence is the same in all contexts. It examines and rejects average utilitarianism, which conflicts with separability of people. It also rejects the view that the value of adding a person to the population might depend on the number of people who already exist.
The Standardized Total Principle
Authors: Broome John
Published: October 2005

This chapter derives the standardized total principle for valuing distributions that contain different numbers of people. It explains that this principle is total utilitarianism, when total utilitarianism is understood in the only way that makes good sense. It is also often called ‘critical-level utilitarianism’. It considers the neutral level for existence, then responds to some objections to total utilitarianism, in particular the repugnant conclusion.
Same‐Lifetime Aggregation
Authors: Broome John
Published: October 2005

This chapter opens the question of aggregating wellbeing across time to determine the value of a single person’s life. It explains the imperfect analogy between this sort of aggregation and aggregation across time to determine the overall value of a world. It assesses the principle of temporal good, the analogue of the principle of personal good. It shows there are plausible grounds for doubting the principle, which derive from various putative pattern goods. Nevertheless, this chapter eventually adopts the principle of temporal good as a default position. From this default position, it derives a same-lifetime addition theorem, which says that wellbeing is aggregated within a life additively.
A Life Worth Living
Authors: Broome John
Published: October 2005

This chapter defines the neutral value for extending life. This is the level of a person’s temporal wellbeing at which it is just worth the person’s continuing to live: extending the life is equally as good for the person as not extending it. The chapter examines and rejects the view that extending a person’s life is normally ethically neutral. This view is analogous to the neutrality intuition about adding a person to the population. It implies that every level of wellbeing is neutral. It may be attributed to Epicurus, who argues that death generally does not harm the person who dies. The chapter considers Epicurus’ arguments.
The Value of a Life
Authors: Broome John
Published: October 2005

This chapter considers whether the neutral level for extending life is a constant. It shows there are plausible grounds for thinking it may not be. However, it adopts the assumptions that it is constant as a default view. This leads to the standardized total principle for lives, which says that the value of a life is the total of temporal wellbeing contained in the life. This amounts to intrapersonal utilitarianism. The chapter considers the implication of this conclusion for the badness of death.
The Theory of Weighing Lives
Authors: Broome John
Published: October 2005

This chapter derives the general theory of value that the book has been aiming at. It considers its implications for the value of longevity,and how the theory might be made practical. It reviews some of the methods used in economics to value lives, including qalys and willingness to pay.
Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe
Authors: Kymlicka Will
Published: October 2005

This paper explores the recent work of Western political theorists on the managing ethnic diversity in Eastern and Central Europe (ECE). It explains an alternative model of ethnic relations which several recent liberal democratic theorists have developed. It concludes by examining the possible applications of this theory to ECE countries.
Liberal Pluralism and Post‐Communism
Authors: Schöpflin George
Published: October 2005

This paper explores the problems of liberal pluralism in post-Communist Central and South-Eastern Europe. It argues that the Anglo-Saxon analyses of post-Communism are hampered by the analysts’ own cultural baggage – the assumptions they make on the nature of democratic best practice. Central and South Eastern Europe will develop their own democratic norms, concepts, and patterns which will be unique and democratic. Deeper and more thoughtful assessments of the success and failure criteria of democracy are needed than those offered by Anglo-Saxon analysis.
Rethinking the State, Minorities, and National Security
Authors: Doroszewska Urszula
Published: October 2005

This paper examines the nature of the state, national security, and the identification of a national minority in the post-Soviet context. It contends that the assumption that post-Soviet states function in the same way as other European states is unwarranted. It then looks at the specific example of the Crimean Tatars.