The New York Times–bestselling author of The Believing Brains explores how science makes us better people. From Galileo and Newton to Thomas Hobbes and Martin Luther King, Jr., thinkers throughout history have consciously employed scientific techniques to better understand the non-physical world. The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment led theorists to apply scientific reasoning to the non-scientific disciplines of politics, economics, and moral philosophy. Instead of relying on the woodcuts of dissected bodies in old medical texts, physicians opened bodies themselves to see what was there; instead of divining truth through the authority of an ancient holy book or philosophical treatise, people began to explore the book of nature for themselves through travel and exploration; instead of the supernatural belief in the divine right of kings, people employed a natural belief in the right of democracy. In The Moral Arc, Shermer explains how abstract reasoning, rationality, empiricism, skepticism—scientific ways of thinking—have profoundly changed the way we perceive morality and, indeed, move us ever closer to a more just world. “Michael Shermer is a beacon of reason in an ocean of irrationality.” —Neil deGrasse Tyson “A memorable book, a book to recommend and discuss late into the night.” —Richard Dawkins “[A] brilliant contribution . . . Sherman’s is an exciting vision.” —Nature

Brian Kateman coined the term "Reducetarian"—a person who is deliberately reducing his or her consumption of meat—and a global movement was born. In this book, Kateman, the founder of the Reducetarian Foundation, presents more than 70 original essays from influential thinkers on how the simple act of cutting 10% or more of the meat from one's diet can transform the life of the reader, animals, and the planet. This book features contributions from such luminaries as Seth Godin, Joel Fuhrman, Victoria Moran, Jeffrey Sachs, Bill McKibben, Naomi Oreskes, Peter Singer, and others. With over 40 vegan, vegetarian, and "less meat" recipes from bestselling cookbook author Pat Crocker, as well as tons of practical tips for reducing the meat in your diet (for example, skip eating meat with dinner if you ate it with lunch; replace your favorite egg omelet with a tofu scramble; choose a veggie burrito instead of a beef burrito; declare a meatless day of the week), The Reducetarian Solution is a life—not to mention planet!—saving book.

“Francis, Clare, and Bonaventure inspire us to re-enchant and heal our spiritual practices and religious institutions and to reclaim our vocation as God’s companions in healing the world.” Francis was inspired by the simple goal of living a gospel life in the footprints of Jesus. Clare took that vision into a deep, contemplative spirituality. A few decades later, Bonaventure explored the theological structure of Francis’s ideal and put the simplicity and spirituality of Francis and Clare in the service of the Franciscan order, the church, and the world. Their timeless wisdom and unique contributions can guide Christians today in finding ways to be, in the words of Francis’s first biographer, “always new, always fresh, always beginning again.” As he did in Walking with Francis of Assisi, Bruce Epperly shows us how the lives of three saints from the thirteenth century offer wisdom, insight, and practical solutions to our challenges in the twenty-first century. Many of those challenges they never could have imagined; others would be very familiar: healing divisions among people, caring for God’s creation in a time of climate change, renewing the church’s gospel commitment to the poor and vulnerable, valuing the human person in an increasingly technological society, recognizing the presence of God in an expanding universe. Faithfulness to Franciscan spirituality involves inviting other companions to join us on the journey. Epperly brings Francis, Clare, and Bonaventure in dialogue with figures such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Pope Francis, Joshua Heschel, Leonardo Boff, Albert Schweitzer, Dorothy Day. Some of these were influenced by Francis; all of them witness to the need for a world formed, sustained, and sanctified by God’s love.

'The Web of Meaning is both a profound personal meditation on human existence and a tour-de-force weaving together of historic and contemporary world-wide secular and spiritual thought on the deepest question of all: why are we here?' Gabor Maté M.D., author, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction 'We need, now more than ever, to figure out how to make all kinds of connections. This book can help--and therefore it can help with a lot of the urgent tasks we face.' Bill McKibben, author, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? As our civilization careens towards a precipice of climate breakdown, ecological destruction and gaping inequality, people are losing their existential moorings. Our dominant worldview of disconnection, which tells us we are split between mind and body, separate from each other, and at odds with the natural world, has passed its expiration date. Yet another world is possible. Award-winning author, Jeremy Lent, investigates humanity's age-old questions - who am I? why am I? how should I live? - from a fresh perspective, weaving together findings from modern systems thinking, evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience with insights from Buddhism, Taoism and indigenous wisdom. The result is a breathtaking accomplishment: a rich, coherent worldview based on a deep recognition of connectedness within ourselves, between each other, and with the entire natural world.

“I love to kill people. I love watching them die.” So said Richard Ramirez, the notorious Los Angeles “Night Stalker.” Can we say that he, and others like him, are pure evil? Or, is that just a matter of personal opinion? This book is about morality. It’s about proving good and evil are real; that they’re not just an opinion; that they are based on a measurable standard; that the measurable standard comes not from religion, not from philosophy, but from science. What is that scientific standard? Symmetry. It’s how things work in physics, in aesthetics, and even in ethics. The same symmetry that governs the interaction among subatomic particles, that forms the wings of a butterfly, that determines the genius of a snowflake, also has fashioned you and me as moral beings, and has given us the choice between what’s evil and what’s good. That’s what I explain.

Reliability problems arise with increasing frequency as our modern systems of telecommunications, information transmission, transportation, and distribution become more and more complex. In December 1989 at DIMACS at Rutgers University, a Workshop on Reliability of Computer and Communications Networks was held to examine the discrete mathematical methods relevant to these problems. There were nearly ninety participants, including theoretical mathematicians, computer scientists, and electrical engineers from academia and industry, as well as network practitioners, engineers, and reliability planners from leading companies involved in the use of computer and communications networks. This volume, published jointly with the Association for Computing Machinery, contains the proceedings from this Workshop. The aim of the Workshop was to identify the latest trends and important open problems, as well as to survey potential practical applications. The Workshop explored questions of computation of reliability of existing systems and of creating new designs to insure high reliability, in addition to the closely related notion of survivability. Redundancy, single stage and multistage networks, interconnected networks, and fault tolerance were also covered. The Workshop emphasized practical applications, with many invited speakers from a variety of companies which are dealing with practical network reliability problems. The success of the Workshop in fostering many new interactions among researchers and practitioners is reflected in the proceedings, which provide an exciting look at some of the major advances at the forefront of this important field of research.

In The Evolution of Moral Progress, Allen Buchanan and Russell Powell resurrect the project of explaining moral progress. They avoid the errors of earlier attempts by drawing on a wide range of disciplines including moral and political philosophy, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, history, and sociology. Their focus is on one especially important type of moral progress: gains in inclusivity. They develop a framework to explain progress in inclusivity to also illuminate moral regression--the return to exclusivist and "tribalistic" moral beliefs and attitudes. Buchanan and Powell argue those tribalistic moral responses are not hard-wired by evolution in human nature. Rather, human beings have an evolved "adaptively plastic" capacity for both inclusion and exclusion, depending on environmental conditions. Moral progress in the dimension of inclusivity is possible, but only to the extent that human beings can create environments conducive to extending moral standing to all human beings and even to some animals. Buchanan and Powell take biological evolution seriously, but with a critical eye, while simultaneously recognizing the crucial role of culture in creating environments in which moral progress can occur. The book avoids both biological and cultural determinism. Unlike earlier theories of moral progress, their theory provides a naturalistic account that is grounded in the best empirical work, and unlike earlier theories it does not present moral progress as inevitable or as occurring in definite stages; but rather it recognizes the highly contingent and fragile character of moral improvement.

A lucid and wide-ranging meditation on why photography is unique among the picture-making arts. Photography matters, writes Jerry Thompson, because of how it works—not only as an artistic medium but also as a way of knowing. With this provocative observation, Thompson begins a wide-ranging and lucid meditation on why photography is unique among the picture-making arts. He constructs an argument that moves with natural logic from Thomas Pynchon (and why we read him for his vision and not his command of miscellaneous facts) to Jonathan Swift to Plato to Emily Dickinson (who wrote “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant”) to detailed readings of photographs by Eugène Atget, Garry Winogrand, Marcia Due, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank. Forcefully and persuasively, he argues for photography as a medium whose business is not constructing fantasies pleasing to the eye or imagination, but describing the world in the toughest and deepest way.

The Functions of Evil Across Disciplinary Contexts explores answers to two important questions about the age-old theme of evil: is there any use in using the concept of evil in cultural, psychological, or other secular evaluations of the world and its productions? Most importantly, if there is, what might these functions be? By looking across several disciplines and analyzing evil as it is referenced across a broad spectrum of phenomena, this work demonstrates the varying ways that we interact with the ethical dilemma as academics, as citizens, and as people. The work draws from authors in different fields—including history, literary and film studies, philosophy, and psychology—and from around the world to provide an analysis of evil in such topics as deeply canonical as Beowulf and Shakespeare to subjects as culturally resonant as Stephen King, Captain America, or the War on Terror. By bringing together this otherwise disparate collection of scholarship, this collection reveals that discussions of evil across disciplines have always been questions of how cultures represent that which they find socially abhorrent. This work thus opens the conversation about evil outside of field-specific limitations, simultaneously demonstrating the assumptions that undergird the manner by which such a conversation proceeds.