For the Common Good reminds us that the Holy Spirit gives each Christian one or more spiritual gifts to be used for the common good. It guides readers to discover their own particular gifts and learn to use their gifts to serve others. Examining key passages in Paul's writings, author Christine Harman leads readers through a personal spiritual gift assessment. She names 25 distinct spiritual gifts—such as discernment, hospitality, compassion, evangelism, or music—and helps people explore scripture references on each one. After identifying their particular gifts, clergy and laypeople will learn how to apply them for the good of their church, community, and the world. This book is ideal for both group study and self-discovery. The book also includes suggestions for how to build a ministry team based on the gifts of each individual. This book is the text for a Lay Servant Ministries advanced course on spiritual gifts. It also can be used for a small-group study.
Robert B. Reich makes a powerful case for the expansion of America’s moral imagination. Rooting his argument in common sense and everyday reality, he demonstrates that a common good constitutes the very essence of any society or nation. Societies, he says, undergo virtuous cycles that reinforce the common good as well as vicious cycles that undermine it, one of which America has been experiencing for the past five decades. This process can and must be reversed. But first we need to weigh the moral obligations of citizenship and carefully consider how we relate to honor, shame, patriotism, truth, and the meaning of leadership. Powerful, urgent, and utterly vital, this is a heartfelt missive from one of our foremost political thinkers.
Alex John London defends a conception of the common good that grounds a moral imperative with two requirements. The first is to promote research that enables key social institutions to effectively, efficiently and equitably safeguard the basic interests of individuals. The second is to ensure that research is organized as a voluntary scheme of social cooperation that respects its various contributors' moral claim to be treated as free and equal. Connecting research to the goals of a just social order grounds a framework for assessing and managing research risk that reconciles these requirements and justifies key oversight practices in non-paternalistic terms. The result is a new understanding of research ethics that resolves coordination problems that threaten these goals and provides credible assurance that the requirements of this imperative are being met.--
This book offers a concise explanation of the history and meaning of American academic freedom, and it attempts to intervene in contemporary debates by clarifying the fundamental functions and purposes of academic freedom in America.--From publisher description.
Daly (economist, the World Bank) and Cobb (philosophy, Claremont Graduate School) expose the outmoded abstractions of mainstream economic theory. They conclude, in particular, that economic growth--the prevailing yardstick for measuring economic success--is no longer an appropriate goal as energy consumption, overpopulation, and pollution increase. Instead, they propose a new measure for the economy--the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The goods that we pursue in our lives are for us, first and foremost, goods that are particular and personal, and thus goods that are immediate to our attention. Not readily apparent to us are goods necessary for the flourishing of our lives but that can be attained by us only in consort with others and thus realized only through collective action. Such goods are common goods. The wider the good, the more extensive must be the human cooperation to realize the good. A stable, orderly society and a habitable planetary environment are common goods that can be realized only in and through the cooperation of all for the benefit of all. That all contribute to the shared good of the whole is a matter of justice—social justice. Acting for the Common Good undertakes the study of social justice in light of the common good—this from the viewpoint of Catholic social teaching, which draws upon the tradition of the common good that is articulated classically in the philosophy of Aristotle and the theology of Thomas Aquinas and in the modern-day social thought and authoritative teachings of the Catholic Church.
In this book of carefully selected essays, Charles Whalen presents constructive analyses of vital economic problems confronting the United States since the 1970s, giving special attention to challenges facing working families. The analyses are grounded in Whalen’s career of more than three decades, during which he has gleaned insight from institutional and post-Keynesian economics and contributed to national economic policy-making, equitable regional development, and worker engagement in business decisions. The result is a compelling case for reforming capitalism by addressing workers’ interests as an integral part of the common good, and for reconstructing economics in the direction of post-Keynesian institutionalism.
Appeals to the ‘common good’ or ‘public interest’ have long been used to justify planning as an activity. While often criticised, such appeals endure in spirit if not in name as practitioners and theorists seek ways to ensure that planning operates as an ethically attuned pursuit. Yet, this leaves us with the unavoidable question as to how an ethically sensitive common good should be understood. In response, this book proposes that the common good should not be conceived as something pre-existing and ‘out there’ to be identified and applied or something simply produced through the correct configuration of democracy. Instead, it is contended that the common good must be perceived as something ‘in here,’ which is known by engagement with the complexities of a context through employing the interpretive tools supplied to one by the moral dimensions of the life in which one is inevitably embedded. This book brings into conversation a series of thinkers not normally mobilised in planning theory, including Paul Ricoeur, Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. These shine light on how the values carried by the planner are shaped through both their relationships with others and their relationship with the ‘tradition of planning’ – a tradition it is argued that extends as a form of reflective deliberation across time and space. It is contended that the mutually constitutive relationship that gives planning its raison d’être and the common good its meaning are conceived through a narrative understanding extending through time that contours the moral subject of planning as it simultaneously profiles the ethical orientation of the discipline. This book provides a new perspective on how we can come to better understand what planning entails and how this dialectically relates to the concept of the common good. In both its aim and approach, this book provides an original contribution to planning theory that reconceives why it is we do what we do, and how we envisage what should be done differently. It will be of interest to scholars, students and practitioners in planning, urban studies, sociology and geography.
The idea of the common good was borrowed by the Fathers of the early Catholic Church from the rich philosophical traditions of ancient Greece and Rome. It has been a fundamental part of Catholic thinking about social, political, and economic life throughout the Catholic intellectual tradition, from Augustine and Aquinas to modern Catholic social thought in the encyclicals of popes in recent centuries. Yet this history has been rooted in the traditions of philosophy and theology. With the rise of the social sciences in the nineteenth century as distinct disciplines no longer limited to the methods of their philosophical origins, humanity has learned a great deal more about the human condition. Empirical Foundations of the Common Good asks two questions: what have the social sciences learned about the common good? how might theology alter its understanding of the common good in light of that insight? In this volume, six social scientists, with backgrounds in economics, political science, sociology, and policy analysis, speak about what their disciplines have to contribute to discussions within Catholic social thought about the common good. Two theologians then respond by examining the insights of social science and exploring how Catholic social thought can integrate social scientific insights into its understanding of the common good. This volume's interplay of social scientific and religious views is a unique contribution to contemporary discussion of what constitutes "the common good."
