What is the spirit that animates collective action? What is the ethos of democracy? Worldly Ethics offers a powerful and original response to these questions, arguing that associative democratic politics, in which citizens join together and struggle to shape shared conditions, requires a world-centered ethos. This distinctive ethos, Ella Myers shows, involves care for "worldly things," which are the common and contentious objects of concern around which democratic actors mobilize. In articulating the meaning of worldly ethics, she reveals the limits of previous modes of ethics, including Michel Foucault's therapeutic model, based on a "care of the self," and Emmanuel Levinas's charitable model, based on care for the Other. Myers contends that these approaches occlude the worldly character of political life and are therefore unlikely to inspire and support collective democratic activity. The alternative ethics she proposes is informed by Hannah Arendt's notion of amor mundi, or love of the world, and it focuses on the ways democratic actors align around issues, goals, or things in the world, practicing collaborative care for them. Myers sees worldly ethics as a resource that can inspire and motivate ordinary citizens to participate in democratic politics, and the book highlights civic organizations that already embody its principles.

In popularizing the term ‘speaking truth to power’, now widely used throughout the world, Michel Foucault established the basis upon which a new ethics can be constructed. This is the thesis that Mark Olssen advances in Constructing Foucault’s ethics. Olssen not only ‘speaks truth’ to existing moral and ethical theories that have dominated western philosophy since Plato, but also shows how, by using Foucault’s insights, an alternative ethical and moral theory can be established that both avoids the pitfalls of postmodern relativism and simultaneously grounds ethical, moral, and political discourse for the present age. Taking the late ‘ethical turn’ in the philosopher’s thought as its starting point, this ambitious study seeks to construct an ethics beyond anything Foucault ever attempted while remaining consistent with his core postulates. In doing so it advances the concept of ‘life continuance’, which expresses a normative orientation to the future in terms of the quest for survival and well-being, giving rise to irreducible normative values as part of the discursive order of events. This approach is explored in contrast with a range of other, established systems, from the Kantian to the Marxist to contract ethics and utilitarianism.

Offering a feminist analysis of foundational Buddhist texts, along with a Buddhist approach to social issues in a globalized world, Hsiao-Lan Hu revitalizes Buddhist social ethics for contemporary times. Hu's feminist exegesis references the Nikāya-s from the "Discourse Basket" of the Pāli Canon. These texts, among the earliest in the Buddhist canon, are considered to contain the sayings of the Buddha and his disciples and are recognized by all Buddhist schools. At the heart of the ethics that emerges is the Buddhist notion of interdependent co-arising, which addresses the sexism, classism, and frequent overemphasis on individual liberation, as opposed to communal well-being, for which Buddhism has been criticized. Hu notes the Buddha's challenge to social hierarchies during his life and compares the notion of "non-Self" to the poststructuralist feminist rejection of the autonomous subject, maintaining that neither dissolves moral responsibility or agency. Notions of kamma, nibbāna, and dukkha (suffering) are discussed within the communal context offered by insights from interdependent co-arising and the Noble Eightfold Path. This work uniquely bridges the worlds of Buddhism, feminism, social ethics, and activism and will be of interest to scholars, students, and readers in all of these areas.

Throughout history, many Christians have embraced a vision of God’s kingdom that encourages active participation in, influencing and transforming the world around them. Was this vision shared by the New Testament writers or the earliest Christians? To find out, we must delve into the Biblical narrative concerning the kingdom of God and its relationship to the present world. My Kingdom is Not of This World develops a Biblical theology of God’s kingdom and its cosmic struggle against a kingdom of darkness. It explores the Bible’s cosmology and the unfolding narrative of this conflict throughout the Bible. Delving into this narrative reveals a recurring theme of sinful humanity - collusion with cosmic darkness to build an earthly utopian kingdom instead of awaiting God’s heavenly kingdom. Understanding the Biblical vision of God’s kingdom and the nature of this present world is of utmost importance. It has profound implications for the Christian life and our interactions with the world.

Alice Crary offers a transformative account of moral thought about human beings and animals. Instead of assuming that the world places no demands on our moral imagination, she underscores the urgency of treating the exercise of moral imagination as necessary for arriving at an adequate world-guided understanding of human beings and animals.

Why did modern capitalism not arise in late imperial China? One famous answer comes from Max Weber, whose The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism gave a canonical analysis of religious and cultural factors in early modern European economic development. In The Religions of China, Weber contended that China lacked the crucial religious impetus to capitalist growth that Protestantism gave Europe. The preeminent historian Ying-shih Yü offers a magisterial examination of religious and cultural influences in the development of China’s early modern economy, both complement and counterpoint to Weber’s inquiry. The Religious Ethic and Mercantile Spirit in Early Modern China investigates how evolving forms of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism created and promulgated their own concepts of the work ethic from the late seventh century into the Qing dynasty. The book traces how religious leaders developed the spiritual significance of labor and how merchants adopted this religious work ethic, raising their status in Chinese society. However, Yü argues, China’s early modern mercantile spirit was restricted by the imperial bureaucratic priority on social order. He challenges Marxists who championed China’s “sprouts of capitalism” during the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries as well as other modern scholars who credit Confucianism with producing dramatic economic growth in East Asian countries. Yü rejects the premise that China needed an early capitalist stage of development; moreover, the East Asian capitalism that flourished in the later half of the twentieth century was essentially part of the spread of global capitalism. Now available in English translation, this landmark work has been greatly influential among scholars in East Asia since its publication in Chinese in 1987.