Social Ethics

Rightly understood and rightly communicated, the Christian faith is one of great joy. It is an invitation to God's kingdom, where tears are replaced by laughter and longing hearts find their purpose and their home. This is the heart of the gospel: God's search to reclaim us and love us as his own. But have we truly grasped this? Those of us who have disdained Christianity as a religion of bigotry - have we repudiated the genuine article or merely demonstrated our own prejudice and ignorance?

Both Stoicism and Minimalism go hand in hand, decluttering your mind as well as decluttering your life, leaving space and energy for the things that matter and are important to you. Having strategies for both is essential to making the most out of these timeless teachings. Life moves at a very fast pace these days, and the Stoic teachings will enable you to not "sweat the small stuff".

Pathways is a collection of Quintus Curtius’ very best short essays from 2015. Speaking in an original and compelling voice, these essays cover an amazing variety of subjects in history, philosophy, current events, ethics, biography, physical health, travel, and language.

As home life and work life become increasingly integrated in contemporary life, success (or failure) in either has an undeniable effect on the other. And while the profound events that began the 21st century have intensified the desire to focus on what matters most to us, there is still often a substantial gap between what we say matters most and the way we actually spend our time and money. Our credit-card and checking-account statements may clearly reflect this. But it is possible to keep both areas moving forward in positive ways.

In Sacrifice, Rene Girard interrogates the Brahmanas of Vedic India, exploring coincidences with mimetic theory that are too numerous and striking to be accidental. The Bible reveals collective violence, similar to that which generates sacrifice everywhere, but instead of making victims guilty, the Bible and the Gospels reveal the persecutors of a single victim. Instead of elaborating myths, they tell the truth absolutely contrary to the archaic sense.

"If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person." ( The World According to Mister Rogers)

In 2004 Kentaro Toyama, an award-winning computer scientist, moved to India to start a new research group for Microsoft. Its mission: to explore novel technological solutions to the world's persistent social problems. But after a decade of designing technologies for humanitarian causes, Toyama concluded that no technology, however dazzling, could cause social change on its own.

All social groups have ideals for behavior, even though ethics vary among different cultures and among individuals within each culture. In trying to understand why, Churchland brings together an understanding of the influences of nature and nurture. She looks to evolution to elucidate how, from birth, our brains are configured to form bonds, to cooperate, and to care. Conscience delves into scientific studies, particularly the fascinating work on twins, to deepen our understanding of whether people have a predisposition to embrace specific ethical stands.

The World Peace Diet has been called one of the most important books of the 21st century: the foundation of a new society based on the truth of the interconnectedness of all life. It is the first book to make explicit the invisible connections between our meals and our broad range of problems -psychological, social, and spiritual, as well as health and environmental. It offers powerful ways we can all experience healing and peace and contribute to a positive transformation of human consciousness.

The book is one of the most influential ethical treatises of all time. Written in 350 BC, it identifies happiness as life's goal. How do we achieve this goal? Not through the satisfactions that come from pleasure, wealth, or fame. According to Aristotle, the true path to happiness lies in contemplation of philosophic truth. This is the only action through which humans can exercise their distinctively unique trait: the ability to reason.

From the mind of one of the world's paramount philosophers comes a profound insight into the universe and man's place in the world. Widely considered to be Benedict de Spinoza's greatest work, Ethics paints an intriguing portrait of reality, the ethical life, and the path to sustainable happiness. Decades ahead of its time, Ethics provides a step-by-step guide to an ethical life. Spinoza provides insights into the human mind, God, emotions, and man's bondage to emotion.

A caustic criticism of nearly every philosophic predecessor and a challenge of traditionally held views on right and wrong, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil paved the way for modern philosophical thought. Through nearly three hundred transformative aphorisms, Nietzsche presents a worldview in which neither truth nor morality are absolutes, and where good and evil are not opposites but counterparts that stem from the same desires.

Americans are in the midst of a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics—across the board, consumption has shot up in the twenty-first century. At the same time, the United States is home to the largest prison system in the world, justified in part by a now zombified "war" on drugs. How did we get here?

The author of the widely praised Age of Greed now gives us a bold indictment of some of our most accepted economic theories - why they’re wrong, the harm they’ve done, and the theories that would vastly improve them.

Every liberal democracy has laws or codes against hate speech - except the United States. For constitutionalists, regulation of hate speech violates the First Amendment and damages a free society. Against this absolutist view, Jeremy Waldron argues powerfully that hate speech should be regulated as part of our commitment to human dignity and to inclusion and respect for members of vulnerable minorities.

As Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch labored to make a place for themselves in a male-dominated world, as they made friendships and families, and as they drifted toward and away from each other, they never stopped insisting that some lives are better than others. Drawing on a cluster of recently opened archives and extensive correspondence and interviews with those who knew them best, Benjamin Lipscomb traces the lives and ideas of four friends who gave us a better way to think about ethics, and ourselves.

"He who controls the spice controls the universe." Frank Herbert's Dune saga is the epic story of Paul, son of Duke Leto Atreides, and heir to the massive fortune promised by the desert planet Arrakis and its vast reservoirs of a drug called "spice." To control the spice, Paul and his mother Jessica, a devotee of the pseudo-religious Bene Gesserit order, must find their place in the culture of the desert-dwelling Fremen of Arrakis. Paul must contend with both the devious rival House Harkonnen and the gargantuan desert sandworms—the source of the spice.

The Church's Best-Kept Secret is a short primer which lays out the basics of Catholic social teaching in a way accessible to the ordinary Catholic as well as to any other person of good will attempting to grasp this often profoundly misunderstood area of Church doctrine and practice. Writing in everyday language for the non-scholar, award-winning writer Mark Shea concisely describes the roots of Catholic social teaching in Scripture and tradition and gives simple, practical examples of how it works in ordinary life.

David Hume (1711-1776) is perhaps best known for his ideas about cause and effect and his criticisms of religion, but he is rarely thought of as a philosopher with practical wisdom to offer. Yet Hume's philosophy is grounded in an honest assessment of nature - human nature in particular. The Great Guide is an engaging and eye-opening account of how Hume's thought should serve as the basis for a complete approach to life. Julian Baggini masterfully interweaves biography with intellectual history and philosophy to give us a complete vision of Hume's guide to life.

David Cay Johnston has made a name for himself as the defender of the common man, calling out the rich and powerful for cheating the system at the expense of everyone else. Whether he's exposing unjust loopholes in the tax code that help the rich get richer or pointing out how powerful corporations pocket government subsidies at excessive taxpayer expense, Johnston is an eloquent town crier for justice and equality.