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Purpose Care is a core concern for early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions. Care may be understood as a basic form of interaction and a foundational need for human beings. For these reasons, care also presents challenges for ECEC staff. The staff must seek practical solutions to problems that philosophers have raised on a theoretical basis concerning ethical traditions, such as the ethics of care. These are the problems of justice, parochialism, and self-sacrifice. Design/Approach/Methods This article develops a theory concerning the ethics of care in ECEC institutions. The theory is informed by qualitative interviews with ECEC teachers reflecting on their caring practices. The study is therefore located at the intersection of normative ethics and applied ethics. In seven in-depth interviews, the informants discussed how to create a caring ECEC environment that is fair and possible to maintain over time. Findings Through analyzing the interviews, I found that caring practices that work toward these ideals can be described as sustainable care. These practices take care of all the children and provide the staff with opportunities to regain the strength they need to create a caring and educating setting. Originality/Value The theory this article develops makes ethics of care applicable and practically relevant to ECEC institutions.

In Secretary for Justice v Tong Wai Hung [2021] HKCA 404, the Hong Kong Court of Appeal affirmed that the doctrine of joint enterprise, as a matter of statutory construction, is applicable onwards to the offences of unlawful assembly and riot under the Public Order Ordinance (Cap. 245), and physical presence at the crime scene is not a pre-requisite to establish liability. The Court argued that such an interpretation strikes a balance between public order concerns and the need to avoid the risk of over-charging. This note contends that the Court of Appeal’s decision will risk exposing numerous citizens, who can hardly be said to share culpability comparable to that of the actual and principal perpetrators of unlawful and riotous assemblies, to prosecution and conviction on questionable legal and evidential basis.

Humility is an important social virtue for musicians as they expose their own egos in the pursuit of artistic self-expression. Research findings have confirmed that humility is an important virtue of strength that lends itself meaningfully to prosocial and ethical interactions among musicians and music educators. In this article, I synthesize research on various forms of humility that emerge from unique social situations in which musicians and music educators might find themselves. In actively seeking to develop their own humility, musicians may relinquish their egotistic self-interest in favor of more meaningful and productive music experiences to be shared by all.

Educational leaders are required to respond in real time to questions, quandaries, and cases that involve individuals in different contexts. They face an array of possible choices that exist in tension. Justice and fairness must coexist with mercy and compassion; in enforcing policy, compliance must make room for flexibility in special cases. School leaders are called to adjudicate competing goods and teach others to do the same. This article examines what practical wisdom is, why it matters, and introduces a theoretically grounded Practical Wisdom Framework (PWF) to help school leaders deliberate well to create and sustain formative institutions.

The health risks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have changed daily life tremendously. Many are uncertain how to respond due to conflicting advice from authorities, and the practical difficulties inherent in protecting human health while sustaining the economy. The Anglican tradition offers a moral framework, practical principles, and a method of public engagement to address the challenges of COVID-19. Kenneth Kirk provides a framework of virtue and spiritual practices and a method of moral reasoning that resolves problems of conscience. William Temple develops principles of love, justice, human dignity, the common good, and the preferential option for the vulnerable that can be applied to concrete cases. Nigel Biggar and Pauli Murray show how to engage the public from an Anglican perspective to spark conversations and create structures that address the pandemic. The result is flexible guidance that can be tailored to the needs of particular persons and communities.

Authenticity has long been held as a virtue. However, is it beneficial for employees to be true to themselves in coworker interactions? Drawing on social penetration theory, we argue that a focal employee’s exhibited authenticity at work helps the employee penetrate the interpersonal boundaries of an interacting coworker and as a result, the employee is more likely to be included in this coworker’s social circles and receive help from the coworker. Accordingly, we propose a dyadic-level model and test this model in two survey studies using a round-robin design. The results of both studies consistently demonstrated that the focal employee’s exhibited authenticity is positively related to help received from the coworker via inclusion in the coworker’s social circle. Further, this positive indirect relationship is moderated by the coworker’s perception of organizational politics, such that the relationship is weaker when the coworker’s perception of organizational politics is high. These findings help advance the understanding of when and how employees can gain relational benefits from displaying authenticity at work.

We extend “4E” cognition to moral psychology. Since acting on affordances typically requires expertise, moral expertise, or virtue, is needed to act on moral affordances and to shape moral agency. Ethical rules and codes, often selected through a process of constraint satisfaction, are also involved in the detection and selection of moral affordances. We argue that individuals who act prudently possess moral expertise that allows them to remain in the “metastable zone” between mind and world, giving them an optimal grip on moral affordances and permitting wise judgement and action. We show how this can be explained via a noncognitivist, affordance-based account of the virtue phronesis (prudence). Our overall approach creates space for reciprocally causal accounts and prospection in explanations of human moral activity.

Although taboo given the traditional Thai value of female sexual conservatism, sex work is a practice for which Thailand has gained international attention. As in other rapidly globalizing contexts, however, Thai youth are increasingly exposed to global values of gender equality, self-fulfillment, and personal choice. This may, in turn, alter youth perspectives of this taboo yet pervasive practice. To understand how Thai youth negotiate local and global values when considering sex work, this study examined the moral evaluations and moral reasoning of adolescents residing in variously globalized communities. Forty participants (20 adolescents in each a more and a less globalized Thai setting) participated in interviews in which they discussed their perspectives of sex work. Quantitative analysis of moral evaluations revealed that rural and urban adolescents alike deemed sex work as mostly morally wrong. Qualitative analysis of moral reasoning revealed that both participant groups prioritized Thai values of sexual purity for women, shame avoidance, and reputation maintenance. Yet distinct values were also endorsed across participant groups. Rural adolescents centered local values (e.g., relational choice, women’s dignity, Buddhist divinity) and urban adolescents drew heavily from global values (e.g., autonomous choice, romantic love, international reputation) when reasoning about the morality and immorality of sex work. Findings point to the manner in which contextual realities shape—and reshape—cultural values in this rapidly globalizing nation.

Anglican moral theology is a genealogy, in MacIntyre’s use of this concept. It is a tradition that is handed on from one generation to another, practically and theoretically. Moral theology is part of the tradition of moral virtue, practiced by Christians, in local communities, families, and of course the church. What is distinctive in Anglicanism was that after 1580 there emerged an Anglican tradition of moral enquiry, which recognized the Protestant emphasis on scripture and a quite different role for the clergy, alongside a deep appreciation of the old, pre-Reformation tradition of moral theology. Today, the Anglican exemplary tradition also incorporates debates on sexuality, gender, and questions of identity. In social ethics, postcolonial voices show both the idolatry of political life and how our common life can be a locus of divine grace. Anglican moral theology is both very vibrant and deeply pluralist today.

This paper explores the relationship between justice, institutions, and the medieval virtue of gratitude. It does this by focusing on a thirteenth-century account of the virtue of gratitude in the work of Thomas Aquinas. It argues that institutions, both formal and informal, provide a helpful framework for considering the relationship between gratitude and a number of important benefactor and beneficiary relationships within the hierarchy of virtues that make up the cardinal virtue of justice. This paper first explores Thomas’ account of the virtues of justice and gratitude. It then looks at recent literature in theology and ethics of institutions showing how formal and informal institutions can help cultivate gratitude.

This article identifies theoretical and practical resources for practitioners and researchers working toward cultivating character and moral judgment in youth. In doing this, the article draws on a 3-year study on character education in U.K. schools completed by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham and research measures provided by the Center for the Study of Ethical Development at the University of Alabama.

The goal of this study was to test nonverbal intelligence and neighborhood social capital as protective factors against future delinquency in early adolescent youth placed at risk by virtue of their involvement in childhood conduct problems. Analyzing longitudinal data from 3,028 youth (1,565 boys, 1,463 girls) in one cohort of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) and 3,682 youth (1,896 boys, 1,786 girls) in a second cohort of the LSAC, nonverbal intelligence, as measured by the Matrix Reasoning subscale of the WISC-IV, displayed a consistent moderating effect on the conduct problems–future delinquency relationship. According to these results, conduct problems were slightly but significantly less likely to lead to delinquency when nonverbal intelligence was high than when it was low or moderate. By shielding at-risk children from future delinquency, protective factors like high nonverbal intelligence may provide a means by which delinquency can be prevented or reduced.

In this article, I consider how our materialist inquiry might enact a sense of justice and virtue in these fascist times. I do so through the following overarching claim: addressing fascism requires a simultaneous challenge to the seductive entanglements of liberalism, humanism, and capitalism, a dense skein of ethical, ontological, epistemological, and material formations we order to conventionally live our lives. To engage such an argument, I first examine fascism as a governing force within our daily lives that works to shape the material contexts we encounter each and every day. To productively engage with the ubiquity of fascist ways of living, I examine philosophical inquiry practices that extend from a decidedly materialist orientation.

Despite the popularity of religion in African settings such as Ghana, reports of moral decline abound. This article reviews traditional, mission, and Christian theological perspectives of morality in Ghana. Using interviews, surveys, and content analysis of vehicle slogans, it examines what Ghanaians today consider to be values in terms of virtues and vices. It explores implications for Christian mission involvement in shaping morality in education and the public sphere.

This reply to my five generous and insightful critics – Gianna Englert, David Williams, Alexandra Oprea, Geneviève Rousslière, and Brandon Turner – focuses on three key issues they raise: the relationship of past ideas to present politics, the utility of ideological labels in the history of political thought, and the relationship of political philosophy to religion and theology.

This article proposes that we recognize ‘accountability’ as a forward-looking virtue, which disposes its possessors to live accountably in relation to those to whom they are rightly answerable, and which can be sub-divided into ‘particular accountability’, exercised within specific and limited relationships, and ‘ultimate accountability’, regarding the shape of one’s life as a whole. The article then proposes that these two forms of accountability find close analogues in two virtues which Thomas Aquinas described as ‘annexed to justice’, namely ‘obedience’ (accountability to human superiors) and ‘religion’ (accountability to God).

While many of the challenges of contemporary medical training are characterized uniformly as “burnout,” such a diagnosis is nonspecific and overlooks the degree to which the flourishing of medical practitioners depends on the development and exercise of virtue. The virtue of hope, in particular, is indispensable to sound medical practice generally and the flourishing of trainees. It is only through sound apprehension of the nature of the virtue of hope, the challenges to the cultivation of hope that residency poses, and practices that allow such cultivation, that contemporary trainees can learn to care well for patients and flourish in their own right. Summary: While the general term “burnout” is used to describe many of the challenges of contemporary medical training, a more precise characterization that unifies these challenges is a deficiency of the virtue of hope. Medical trainees face many obstacles to the cultivation of hope during training, but learning both to correctly identify this deficiency, and practices which prove a fitting response, offers a way forward.

This opening article will offer a brief introduction to what it means to understand accountability as a virtue. To do so, I first propose a definition of the condition of accountability, which I go on to distinguish from responsibility. Based on this definition, I then present an account of the corresponding virtue of accountability. Publisher PDF

Why did the Biblical writers see the fear of the Lord as a virtue that is conducive to human flourishing? It is difficult for contemporary readers to understand how fear of anything can be virtuous. I propose that the fear of the Lord should be understood as accountability to God. I defend the claim that someone who displays excellence in an accountability relationship does display a virtue, and that this virtue is particularly valuable when exercised in relation to God. If we reject an individualistic view of moral motivation inspired by Kant, we can see that being held accountable does not necessarily diminish personal autonomy. The primary motivation for the person who has the virtue of accountability is not fear of punishment, but a desire to do what is right because it is right, rooted in an appreciation of the standing of one to whom one is accountable.

The Caraka Saṃhitā (ca. first century BCE–third century CE), the first classical Indian medical compendium, covers a wide variety of pharmacological and therapeutic treatment, while also sketching out a philosophical anthropology of the human subject who is the patient of the physicians for whom this text was composed. In this article, I outline some of the relevant aspects of this anthropology – in particular, its understanding of ‘mind’ and other elements that constitute the subject – before exploring two ways in which it approaches ‘psychiatric’ disorder: one as ‘mental illness’ ( mānasa-roga), the other as ‘madness’ ( unmāda). I focus on two aspects of this approach. One concerns the moral relationship between the virtuous and the well life, or the moral and the medical dimensions of a patient’s subjectivity. The other is about the phenomenological relationship between the patient and the ecology within which the patient’s disturbance occurs. The aetiology of and responses to such disturbances helps us think more carefully about the very contours of subjectivity, about who we are and how we should understand ourselves. I locate this interpretation within a larger programme on the interpretation of the whole human being, which I have elsewhere called ‘ecological phenomenology’.

Is disgust morally valuable? The answer to that question turns, in large part, on what we can do to shape disgust for the better. But this cultivation question has received surprisingly little attention in philosophical debates. To address this deficiency, this article examines empirical work on disgust and emotion regulation. This research reveals that while we can exert some control over how we experience disgust, there’s little we can do to substantively change it at a more fundamental level. These empirical insights have revisionary implications both for debates about disgust’s moral value and for our understanding of agency and moral development more generally.

Women routinely practise taxing safety strategies in public, such as avoiding unlit spaces after dark. To date, scholars have understood these behaviors as means by which women bolster their physical safety in public. My in-depth interviews with women in Greater Vancouver, British Columbia suggest that, much less than reliably enhancing women’s safety, safety work often exacerbates women’s fear of violent crime and unreliably mitigates their exposure to violence. I thus interrogate the protective function of gendered safekeeping and reconceptualize women’s safety work as virtue maintenance work, theorizing that women practice risk-management in public places to attain the ontological security associated with evading subjectivities of gendered imprudence.

According to much of self-labelled coercion theory, the state is both the ground of egalitarian demands of distributive justice, and the (sole) domain to which such demands apply, in virtue of its exercise of coercive power which only distributive equality can justify. This article argues that, when properly unpacked in its theoretical commitments, coercion theory has surprising implications both within and beyond borders. Within borders, coercion is either *fully* justified by its necessity for autonomy; or it is not, in which case egalitarian distributions cannot do the trick, either – although *political* equality might. Beyond borders, the view turns out to have significantly demanding global implications, contrary to how it is often presented. It indeed differs from global egalitarianism simpliciter, but it gives rise to an interesting, complex set of cross-border obligations which reach far beyond the ‘global sufficiency, domestic equality’ picture. This surprising account of the implications of coercion theory rests on a crucial insight: when closely examined, the view turns out to be grounded in a natural duty of justice account of political obligation.

Scholars in the fashion discipline have become more attentive to investigating how the fashion business can become more circular. In the past, many of the studies focused on identifying the supporting and/or hindering factors when creating a circular fashion (CF). Despite the insights these studies provide, their contributions are relatively limited in that many of them are exploratory in nature and skewed toward understanding CF from the stance of fashion companies who are situated at the supply side of the fashion economy. In contrast, little attention has been given to how consumers, on the demand side, perceive a CF. We employed a mixed-method approach using 332 respondents’ narrative data and empirically identified whether consumers attribute moral responsibility to fashion companies as well as to themselves for creating a CF and, if so, whether there are any nuanced differences in their perceptions of consumer versus corporate moral responsibilities for a CF.

In The Fable of the Bees, Bernard Mandeville declared that ‘it is impossible we could be sociable Creatures without Hypocrisy’. Mandeville set out his ideas of sociability against Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, whose notions of virtue he dismissed as ‘a vast Inlet to Hypocrisy’. The main goal of this article is to reconstruct Mandeville’s account of hypocrisy, first by explaining why he accords it such a prominent role in understanding our moral and social norms, and, second, by piecing together his criticisms of Shaftesbury’s rival ethical theory. In doing so, the article outlines a more general Mandevillean framework for assessing when hypocrisy is likely to prove either socially beneficial or pernicious, while also examining what is at stake in choosing to expose rather than tolerate other people’s hypocrisy.

Bureaucracy is a highly misunderstood and infamous concept which has been taken in varied perspective by public at large. For a state, the rule of law is the most important prerequisite to its contributory existence and bureaucracy act as a tool to it. This essay attempts to bring out the good and bad part of Weberian model of bureaucracy and then analyzing them to find out whether the benefits outweigh the disadvantages or not. There are various schools of thoughts which are having different ways of looking at bureaucracy and finding its pros and cons as per their interpretations and convenience. People of a society enjoy the benefits of the civilized system by virtue of the effective role of the bureaucracy, however they are always finding themselves comfortable in coming out with negative and positive criticism of the bureaucracy. This essay attempts at finding out both the sides of the arguments and leaves with the readers the scope of interpreting them as per their extent of understanding them.

This paper reconstructs the political thought of the Scottish legal philosopher, and eventually MEP, Sir Neil MacCormick (1941–2009), the founder of “constitutional pluralism,” one of the most influential legal theories of the European union today. It argues that his legal theory is underpinned by a coherent and original political theory of post-sovereignty. But, contrary to many current interpretations, this article argues that normatively, constitutional pluralism is not a purely liberal theory. Neither is it inherently illiberal, as has been contended. Instead, this article spells out the hybrid institutional design imagined by N. MacCormick and inspired by the thought of D. Hume, as well as the lineaments of an ethical theory of post-sovereignty he developed. So doing, while I will argue that it ultimately leads to a kind of republican cosmopolitanism, the political theory of constitutional pluralism is shown to open up an important, if not fully developed, avenue to escape some shortcoming commonly associated with post-sovereignty.

In our ever more connected and open-access world, the vocation of teaching continually strives to rearticulate its significance. This study contributes to such ventures by drawing upon recent theology, psychology, philosophy, and literary theory to envision instruction as a uniquely narratival and virtue-formative practice, especially in Christian educational contexts. Four distinctly narratival-pedagogical approaches are illustrated, followed by a discussion of their capability for instilling and cultivating diverse intellectual virtues.

Citizens of liberal democracies today increasingly exhibit a distrust of perceived elites, especially experts and those of advanced educational attainment more generally. John Stuart Mill’s work offers potential responses to this phenomenon. Mill regards deference to superior wisdom as an essential part of a well-developed character while esteeming independent thought. Although his emphasis on the importance of character formation is well known, his concern for inculcating a salutary form of deference has been underexplored. I show how Mill’s approaches to this task include redesigning the political process to amplify the voice of the highly educated, promoting more widespread opportunities for learning, and consistently emphasizing the partiality of human understanding. I also compare Mill’s treatment of the place of deference in democratic politics with that of Alexis de Tocqueville’s, and consider how Tocqueville might critique Mill’s strategies for cultivating deference. In so doing, I demonstrate how these authors provide us with resources for navigating the tensions between popular sovereignty and expertise, and between independent thought and intellectual authority.

I suggest that virtue ethics can learn from Foucault’s critical observations on biopolitics and governmentality, which identify how a good cannot be disassociated from power and freedom. I chart a way through which virtue ethics internalizes this critical point. I argue that this helps address concerns that both virtue ethics and the critical scholarship inspired by Foucault otherwise ignore. I apply virtue ethics to the contexts of refugee arrival, asylum procedure, and immigrant integration in Western Europe; I then see how Foucault’s critical thought provides a counterpoint to virtue ethics; I finally analyze how incorporating that critique allows virtue ethics to make sense of both the context and the stakes involved.

The system of free expression John Milton defends in Areopagitica, a pamphlet against prior restraint in publishing, is often characterized as merely a proto-liberal, truth-based marketplace of ideas theory. But this represents a misunderstanding of Milton’s views on the freedoms of conscience, speech, and the press. The tendency in political theory, philosophy, and law to reduce the “free speech Milton” to Areopagitica, and the reduction of that essay to several soundbites, has meant sidelining both the significant exceptions to expressive liberties that Milton calls for and also the role of the social in his theory. This incomplete characterization has enabled Milton’s misuse in First Amendment discourse and jurisprudence, where he is made to support hierarchical approaches to free speech that privilege public political speech and are therefore ill-equipped to address the full range of communicative experiences. More comprehensive readings of Milton, however, reveal both certain limits to free expression, and also deep consideration for a wide range of speech acts. By reading Milton’s theory of expressive liberties in light of the justifications he provides for those freedoms—i.e., virtue-building and Truth-seeking—this essay provides a fuller account of his views. What emerges is a distinctly Miltonian, virtue-driven “political theory of everyday talk” that locates value in even the most ordinary communicative acts. This theory—embracing both verbal and nonverbal expression—not only complements existing political theories of the everyday but can also help illuminate contemporary free speech concerns, many of which stem from the libertarian approach to expressive liberties that Milton (inadvertently) helped inspire.

Moral philosophy in early American collegiate education founded its understanding and pursuit of virtue on the theological truth that humans are made in God’s image. Therefore, to fulfill our purpose, we need to acquire creaturely analogues of God’s virtues. Later American moral philosophy scholars and texts, however, began to use a different rationale for teaching virtue—we need virtue to support American liberal democracy. As a result, by the late twentieth century, American moral educators at the collegiate level only focused on helping students develop a small set of virtues related to students’ professional and civic identities.

Forgiveness is a universal virtue that appears in most cultures and religions but with cultural particularities. The current pilot research uses a mixed-methods approach to describe variations in everyday theologies of forgiveness across culture. Universal understandings of forgiveness were documented among Study 1 participants who represented three American Christian subcultures (Brazilian-Americans, Chinese-Americans, and American students), replicated in Study 2 (with Hong Kong church members and American students). Members of non-American cultures described efforts to reach social harmony by maintaining a culturally appropriate tension between reconciliation and responsibility in relationships, e.g., by demonstrating concerns with saving face, with the impact of violations on the larger community, and for personal responsibility in mitigating interpersonal violations. Differences among participants in these pilot studies were associated with the different cultural histories of the participants’ cultures and whether the cultures they represent are broadly categorized as collectivist or individualist.

Systematic reviews by virtue of being a pre-determined, transparent, and comprehensive plan and search strategy are fast gaining popularity in psychology in South Africa. A systematic review allows one to obtain a thorough overview regarding the recent developments and debates on a given topic with the addition of metacommentary. In South Africa, we have noted stark differences in the reporting of systematic reviews. Often studies are identified as systematic reviews but methodologically have failed to meet the rigorous criteria that characterise this method. This article aims to provide a guide for the novice researcher on conducting systematic reviews. We draw on a practical case study by Hassem and Laher where the systematic review method was used to establish the efficacy of online depression screening tools in the South African context as a practical illustration of the systematic review method. In so doing, the affordances and limitations of the systematic review method are discussed.

This article analyses virtue and vice lists in ancient Hebrew literature, specifically focusing on those found in 1QS and 4Q286. It is argued that these texts from Qumran offer distinctive evidence for extended lists of virtues and vices. Apart from illustrating ideals of the yaḥad movement, the sources invite us to consider what counted as ethical to ancient Jews and whether the texts indicate any attempt to organize ethical concerns. The authors lacked a meta-category denoting “virtue” (cf. ἀρετή in Greek or virtus in Latin), but they discussed a myriad of specific virtues and vices by way of listing and grouping (un)desirable qualities that can be characterized as moral, intellectual, and ritual. It is also likely that the authors regarded the qualities of wisdom and truth as elevated “master virtues” of some kind. The article ends with reflections on the types of ethics attested in 1QS and 4Q286. Drawing on anthropological research, the texts are argued to primarily promote what could be called “ethics of divinity.”

In the past two decades, Confucian meritocrats have justified the unequal distribution of political power by appeal to the ideal of Confucian virtue politics. In this article, I demonstrate that at the heart of Confucian virtue politics lies a political leader’s affective accountability and show that non-democratic Confucian meritocracy fails to embody this moral ideal. Then, I argue that the ideal of Confucian virtue politics can be better realized in democratic system. To this end, I first describe how ordinary citizens’ moral demand for a political leader’s affective accountability in a consolidated democratic society can make theoretical space for a Confucian political leader. Next, I articulate the role of a Confucian political leader in contemporary democratic society from a normative standpoint and show that at the core of Confucian democratic meritocracy lies ‘mutual moral transformation’, formed by dialectical interactions between a virtuous Confucian political leader and empowered citizens.

This paper lays out a model of diminished citizenship as a tool for understanding the experiences of the large population of people who, at least in part by virtue of their relations with criminal justice apparatuses, do not benefit from the full complement of responsibilities and rights associated with citizenship in a modern democracy. The frame of diminished citizenship places mass incarceration within a larger historical and social context, moving ideas about “criminals” away from the individual focus of mainstream criminology and providing a useful framework for considering how a variety of marginalized groups navigate the American landscape. At the same time, the frame of mass incarceration offers insights into a crucial mechanism for constructing, diminishing and enforcing citizenship in the United States. Our argument draws on our decade-long ethnographic research with a cohort of women who had been released from prison in Massachusetts in 2007–2008.

Emboldened by the rise of China, a meritocratic trend has surged in recent Confucian political theory. Confucian meritocracy is upheld as an equally viable alternative, if not a superior one, to democracy because many think that the latter’s populist vices do not exist in the former’s hierarchical, managerial political structure. This article addresses this seemingly dichotomous relationship between democracy and Confucian meritocracy by drawing on Zhu Xi (1130–1200 AD). I demonstrate those overlooked egalitarian qualities inherent in Confucian meritocracy, which can render it naturally compatible with democracy. Thus, an accurate understanding of Confucian meritocracy requires us not to see it as an opposite of democracy. Rather, Confucian meritocracy actually fosters moral growth in the populace by encouraging them to participate in politics under the instruction of their political leaders, who are to be guided by two egalitarian pedagogical principles, that is, universal inclusion and student participation.

This article argues that Thomas Aquinas’s definition of charity in the Summa Theologiae as ‘a kind of friendship’ represents a distinctive and theologically significant development of both the Aristotelian and the Christian monastic traditions on which he builds. By approaching his discussion of charity in the secunda secundae through the gateway of friendship, Thomas is able to characterize the spiritual vision of this portion of the Summa through a twofold movement of grace and participation. The shape of this twofold movement has an implicitly incarnational character, and thus points to the divine Subject of the Summa’s third and culminating volume. But the participatory aspect of this spiritual theology also reveals the indispensable role of the human person, and thus allows Thomas to offer a nuanced explanation of the ways that friendship with God relates to friendships with other human beings.

Several recent educators have proposed a reconsideration of the importance of love in higher education. Drawing on resources from early Christian catechesis, this article explores ways in which educators might reflect on the role of love in the acquisition of virtue. In conversation with Origen and Augustine, I argue that an account of love rooted in a theology of the Incarnation is fundamental to the initial processes of forming character, even while—and indeed especially while—remaining largely inconspicuous in the process. Love is everywhere present in teaching virtue to new Christians, though in much more complex and interesting ways than a simple explication of love as a topic of study among others. Though far apart in time and geography, the examples of Origen and Augustine provide a rich tapestry of pedagogical wisdom from which educators might draw today.

The presented study examined dynamics and perceptions among family members of ideologues lawbreaking animal rights activists. In the course of the study, parents and spouses of activists were interviewed, and its findings highlighted a number of key themes: glorification of the activist, an envy directed toward elements of the activism; personal gain acquired by virtue of the relationship, as well as self-discovery which family members experienced by their exposure to activism. By using Maruna’s “redemption script” (2001), the study presents the manner by which perception of an activist as an idealist, leads his family members to construct a new narrative that qualifies transgressions based on ideology. The redemption script turns out to be bidirectional. Thus, while Maruna presented it as an aid for desisting delinquency, the study indicates that as far as it concerns breaking the law in favor of animals, it can mobilize family members to support all shades of activism.

Humility is considered to be an important social virtue, particularly in interpersonal contexts. Given the highly social nature of music participation, researchers have begun exploring the potential role that humility might play in music education. The purpose of this study was to examine how middle school, high school, and undergraduate band students ( N = 116) perceived the virtue of humility, including whether they viewed it to be a social strength among various types of musicians. Results indicated that students viewed humility to be a positive quality and a social strength for different types of musicians (i.e., band directors, section leaders, famous musicians). However, middle schoolers struggled to articulate a meaning of humility consistent with accepted definitions put forth by social scientists. Based on these findings, I offer recommendations for music educators to model and promote humility as a positive and necessary virtue in their ensembles and classrooms.

This critical cyber-autoethnography delves into the processes of adopting a wearable device, specifically a smartwatch. As I contemplate various moments during which my foreign body (by virtue of being an immigrant) relies on another foreign body (smartwatch) to feel at “home” in spaces ranging from hostile to uncomfortable, I articulate how the status of the wearable shifts from that of an accessory to an intimate interface. The narratives presented here center intersectionality by exploring the racialized and gendered dimensions of my immigrant experience in the United States by focusing on how my brown, female body processes/filters everyday microaggressions through my smartwatch. By joining my body with a digital device, that is, becoming a cyborg, I explain how my experiences of marginalization are qualitatively modified. Articulating the shifting privileges I enjoy in the form of economic stability and linguistic competency prevents fetishizing the digital and avoids technological determinism. In conclusion, this autoethnography uses the concept of the cyborg to map the connections between embodied experience; symbolic, sensory potential of digital devices; and intersectional identities.

This article examines the significance of patience in Søren Kierkegaard’s 1843–1844 discourses on patience as a needed corrective for the “common sense” perception of time as an adversary rather than a friend. Kierkegaard stresses the biblical idea of the goodness of time especially in connection to the formation of the self. According to his authorship, the self is not a static being, but one that develops, expands, and becomes its most mature expression through God’s transformative work in time. This perspective on the self and its relationship to time illuminates the crucial role of patience as an essential formative virtue. While there are many insights to be garnered from Kierkegaard’s idea of patience for philosophical discussions on the nature of the self, this article focuses on how they are especially salient and applicable for spiritual formation and discipleship.