David M. Craig - Böcker

The first book on the Victorian critic and public intellectual John Ruskin by a scholar of religion and ethics, this work recovers both Ruskin's engaged critique of economic life and his public practice of moral imagination. With its reading of Ruskin as an innovative contributor to a tradition of ethics concerned with character, culture, and community, this book recasts established interpretations of Ruskin's place in nineteenth-century literature and aesthetics, challenges nostalgic diagnoses of the supposed historical loss of virtue ethics, and demonstrates the limitations of any politics that eschews common purpose as vital to individual agency and social welfare. Although Ruskin's moralistic efforts did not always allow for democratic individuality, equality, and contestation, his eclecticism, Craig argues, helps to correct these problems. Further, Ruskin's interdisciplinary explorations of beauty, work, nature, religion, politics, and economic value reveal the ways in which his insights into the practical connections between aesthetics and ethics, and culture and character, might be applied to today's debates about liberal modernity today. With the triumph of global capitalism, and the near-silence of any opposing voice, Ruskin's model of an engaged reading of culture and his public practice of moral imagination deserve renewed attention. This book provides students in religion, politics, and social theory with a timely reintroduction to this timeless figure.

A fresh and sympathetic interpretation of Robert Southey's changing social and political ideas, shedding new light on contemporary thought.Like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey has been remembered not just as a romantic poet but also as a political apostate. In the 1790s he was fired by enthusiasm for the French Revolution, and was knownas a radical and a republican. By the 1820s, however, he was not only the poet laureate, but a fierce conservative who opposed the reform of Church and State. Yet at the same time his reactionary politics were mixed with anxietyabout the effects of industrialisation and the growth of poverty, leading some commentators to view him as a precursor of socialism and collectivism.This book charts the development of Southey's social and political ideas inorder to throw light on the problems generated by the concept of 'romantic apostasy'. It draws on his poetry, histories, journalism and letters to show that his intellectual evolution was more complex than has previously been thought. In so doing it touches on numerous themes: theological politics, national character, the 'social question', providence and history, questions of race, empire and civilisation as well as the nature of republicanism and the evolution of conservatism. As such it is an important contribution towards the wider understanding of the intellectual aftermath of the French Revolution in Britain.DAVID M. CRAIG is a lecturer in History at the University ofDurham.

David M. Craig traveled across the United States to assess health care access, delivery and finance in this country. He interviewed religious hospital administrators and interfaith activists, learning how they balance the values of economic efficiency and community accountability. He met with conservatives, liberals, and moderates, reviewing their ideas for market reform or support for the Affordable Care Act. He discovered that health care in the US is not a private good or a public good. Decades of public policy and philanthropic service have made health care a shared social good. Health Care as a Social Good: Religious Values and the American Democracy argues that as escalating health costs absorb more and more of family income and government budgets, we need to take stock of the full range of health care values to create a different and more affordable community-based health care system. Transformation of that system is a national priority but Americans have failed to find a way to work together that bypasses our differences.Craig insists that community engagement around the common religious conviction that healing is a shared responsibility can help us achieve this transformation -- one that will not only help us realize a new and better system, but one that reflects the ideals of American democracy and the common good.