This book examines Christianity in China by building a constructive theology for the distinctive realities of Chinese culture, society, and politics. It proposes Christian public responsibility to identify the moral problems in Chinese public life and proposes a public face of Christianity in China theologically and ethically.

In the village of Bisipara in eastern India, an anthropologist is witness to a drama when a young girl takes a fever and quickly dies. The villagers find Susilla's death suspicious and fear that she was possessed. Holding an investigation to find someone to blame, they carry out a hurried inquiry because the stage must be cleared for the annual celebration of the birthday of the god Sri Ramchandro. However, they eventually agree on the identity of a culprit an extract from him a large fine. F.G. Bailey, who was doing fieldwork in Bisipara in the 1950's, tells what it was like to be living there during this witch-hunt. As his narrative unfolds, we sense the very texture of the villagers lives—their caste relationships, occupations, kinship networks, and religious practices. We become familiar with the sites, sounds, and smells of Bisipara and with many of the village men and women and we learn their ideas of health and disease, their practice of medicine and burial customs, their ways of resolving discord. The author's commentary opens the curtain on a larger and more complicated scene. It portrays a community in the process of change: from one aspect, the offender is seen as a heroic individual who has broken from the chains of the past, a dissenter standing up for his rights against an entrenched and conservative establishment. From the opposite point of view he is a troublemaker who rejects the moral order on which society and the good life depend, a man who has trespassed outside his proper domain. From Bailey's neutral perspective, the offenders conduct threaten those in power; their determined and successful effort to punish him was an attempt to protect their own privileged position. In doing so, of course, they could say that they were defending the moral order of their community. Bailey moves easily between field notes and memory as he takes a new look at his first impressions and reflects on what he has learned. His elegant book is a powerful reassessment of anthropology's most enduring themes and debates which will imprint on the reader's mind a vivid image of a place and its people.

Christopher Tilmouth presents an accomplished study of Early Modern ideas of emotion, self-indulgence, and self-control in the literature and moral thought of the late 16th and 17th centuries (1580 to 1680).

This work combines the two most common approaches used to introduce students or general readers to ethics: the historical and the applied. Using these approaches, Sterba examines traditional ethical theories and disagreements, exploring Aristotelian, Kantian, and utilitarian ethics, as well as their contemporary defenders.

"The purpose of the present work is to enquire into the bearing of ethical ideas upon the view of reality as a whole which we are justified in forming."--Page 1.

We are all guilty of it. We call people terrible names in conversation or online. We vilify those with whom we disagree, and make bolder claims than we could defend. We want to be seen as taking the moral high ground not just to make a point, or move a debate forward, but to look a certain way--incensed, or compassionate, or committed to a cause. We exaggerate. In other words, we grandstand. Nowhere is this more evident than in public discourse today, and especially as it plays out across the internet. To philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, who have written extensively about moral grandstanding, such one-upmanship is not just annoying, but dangerous. As politics gets more and more polarized, people on both sides of the spectrum move further and further apart when they let grandstanding get in the way of engaging one another. The pollution of our most urgent conversations with self-interest damages the very causes they are meant to forward. Drawing from work in psychology, economics, and political science, and along with contemporary examples spanning the political spectrum, the authors dive deeply into why and how we grandstand. Using the analytic tools of psychology and moral philosophy, they explain what drives us to behave in this way, and what we stand to lose by taking it too far. Most importantly, they show how, by avoiding grandstanding, we can re-build a public square worth participating in.