This book is a vigorous reassessment of the nature of politics and political theorizing.

Biblical scholars and theologians search for the meaning of the common good for our time.

In Search of the Common Good: Guideposts for Concerned Citizens is a sequel to the author’s book Citizens of the Broken Compass: Ethical and Religious Disorientation in the Age of Technology. As the title indicates, the work is not addressed to an academic audience, but rather to a general readership, i.e. to concerned citizens who are interested in thinking through some of the ethical and moral issues facing us today. Still, the book is not a work on ethics or even on morality in the strict sense, but rather an attempt to locate certain guideposts for thinking about the common good in society. The basic theme of the entire book is this: Concern for the common good should be the context in which individual human rights are interpreted.

Common life in our society is in decline—our communities are disintegrating, our public discourse is hateful, and economic inequalities are widening. In this book, Jake Meador reclaims a vision of common life for our fractured times: a vision that doesn't depend on the destinies of our economies or our political institutions, but on our citizenship in a heavenly city. Only through that vision can we truly work together for the common good.

Anna Rowlands offers a guide to the main time periods, key figures, documents and themes of thinking developed as Catholic Social Teaching (CST). A wealth of material has been produced by the Catholic Church during its long history which considers the implications of scripture, doctrine and natural law for the way these elements live together in community - most particularly in the tradition of social encyclicals dating from 1891. Rowlands takes a fresh approach in weaving overviews of the central principles with the development of thinking on political community and democracy, migration, and integral ecology, and by considering the increasingly critical questions concerning the role of CST in a pluralist and post-secular context. As such this book offers both an incisive overview of this distinctive body of Catholic political theology and a new and challenging contribution to the debate about the transformative potential of CST in contemporary society.

This edited collection proposes a common good approach to development theory and practice. Rather than focusing on the outcomes or conditions of development, the contributors concentrate on the quality of development processes, suggesting that a common good dynamic is key in order to trigger development. Resulting from more than three years of research by an international group of over fifty scholars, the volume advocates for a modern understanding of the common good—rather than a theological or metaphysical good—in societies by emphasising the social practice of ‘commoning’ at its core. It suggests that the dynamic equilibrium of common goods in a society should be at the centre of development efforts. For this purpose, it develops a matrix of common good dynamics, accounting for how institutions, social norms and common practices interconnect by identifying five key drivers not only of development, but human development (agency, governance, justice, stability, humanity). Based on this matrix, the contributors suggest a possible metric for measuring the quality of these dynamics. The last section of the book highlights the possibilities enabled by this approach through a series of case studies. The concept of the common good has recently enjoyed a revival and inspired practitioners keen to look beyond the shortcomings of political and economic liberalism. This book builds on those efforts to think beyond the agenda of twentieth-century development policies, and will be of interest to those working in the fields of development, economics, sociology, philosophy and political science.

This reference work is an important resource in the growing field of heroism studies. It presents concepts, research, and events key to understanding heroism, heroic leadership, heroism development, heroism science, and their relevant applications to businesses, organizations, clinical psychology, human wellness, human growth potential, public health, social justice, social activism, and the humanities. The encyclopedia emphasizes five key realms of theory and application: Business and organization, focusing on management effectiveness, emotional intelligence, empowerment, ethics, transformational leadership, product branding, motivation, employee wellness, entrepreneurship, and whistleblowers; clinical-health psychology and public health, focusing on stress and trauma, maltreatment, emotional distress, bullying, psychopathy, depression, anxiety, family disfunction, chronic illness, and healthcare workers’ wellbeing; human growth and positive psychology, discussing altruism, authenticity, character strengths, compassion, elevation, emotional agility, eudaimonia, morality, empathy, flourishing, flow, self-efficacy, joy, kindness, prospection, moral development, courage, and resilience; social justice and activism, highlighting anti-racism, anti-bullying, civil disobedience, civil rights heroes, climate change, environmental heroes, enslavement heroes, human rights heroism, humanitarian heroes, inclusivity, LGBTQ+ heroism, #metoo movement heroism, racism, sustainability, and women’s suffrage heroes; and humanities, relating to the mythic hero’s journey, bliss, boon, crossing the threshold, epic heroes, fairy tales, fiction, language and rhetoric, narratives, mythology, hero monomyth, humanities and heroism, religious heroes, and tragic heroes.

This book presents and evaluates the understanding of political form in the work of Pierre Manent. The study of political form is Manent's central philosophical task. He is interested in the nature of man, in the action that makes us human, and thus in politics and political action as privileged windows into human nature and what it is to be human. Manent places himself in the classical political tradition, with its foundations in human nature and in a politics that accords with nature. He also situates himself within a triangle of faith, philosophy, and politics, all of which interest him as part of the reality of things even as he avoids an exclusive commitment to any one vertex in his investigation. The book first examines the major influences on Manent; the overarching questions that guide his work on political form, the "theologico-political question" and the question of the "modern difference" with the ancient view of man and politics; and his two intertwined paths of inquiry into political events and political thought. Manent describes political forms as "the modes of human association that no science has taken as its specific object." City, empire, Church, national monarchy or nation-state, and modern state are the principal forms that he examines. The book discusses Manent's thinking on each form in turn together with the tensions that propel the changes or motion in political form that Manent sees as driving and revealing the course of European political development. Using the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, Russell Hittinger, Étienne Gilson, Robert Sokolowski, and Francis Slade, the book evaluates Manent's insights into the modern state and political condition, which he judges to be exhausted, as well as his call for the preservation of the form of the "nation marked by Christianity."

What constitutes the common good in American public education? This volume explores the ongoing debate between those who expect schools to cultivate citizens through personal, moral, and social development, as well as to bind diverse groups into one nation, and a new generation of school reformers intent on using schools to solve the nation's economic problems by equipping students with marketable skills.