Matthew T. Lee - Böcker

This edited volume focuses on both conceptual and practical challenges in measuring well-being. Leveraging insights across diverse disciplines, including psychology, economics, sociology, statistics, public health, theology, and philosophy, contributors consider the philosophical and theological traditions on happiness, well-being and the good life, as well as recent empirical research on well-being and its measurement. The chapters review what is known empirically about how different measures of well-being relate to each other and considers various arguments for and against use of specific measures of well-being in different contexts. Further, the volume includes discussion of how a synthesis of existing research helps us make sense of the proliferation of different measures and concepts within the field, while also foregrounding the insights gained by investigations and conceptual thinking occurring across diverse disciplines.

Leadership for Flourishing seeks to demonstrate that a group's leadership impacts the group's flourishing and that flourishing impacts leadership. The contributors develop frameworks and practices that highlight the dynamic between leadership and flourishing. They identify the positive examples around the globe that are evolving what is possible around leadership for flourishing. Flourishing is a global goal (e.g., UN SDGs), a global right (e.g., UN human development report), and becoming a global rule (e.g., ESG standards). It is time to showcase leadership for flourishing. Divided into four parts, the book brings together leading scholars and reflective practitioners to describe the current state of what is known about leadership for flourishing; reframe what flourishing and leadership are, in this expanding context; explain how leadership affects flourishing within organizations and across ecosystems; and identify what is emerging in the practice fields of leadership for flourishing. To each chapter, the authors bring a strong understanding of the current, underlying philosophy of their field of inquiry, combined with many years of evolving their understanding through their fieldwork and practical experience, with a passionate drive towards leadership for flourishing. This work utilizes several empirical methods, including ethnographic observations, surveys, case studies, and archival data analysis within one organization or across multiple organizations.

Research has shown the important role of religious social networks in fostering benevolence, but some questions have remained: Why are people who frequently pray or attend church more generous with their time and money? Why does one religious group rather than another get involved in certain forms of outreach? Drawing on an extensive survey of 1,200 Christian men and women across the United States, as well as 120 in-depth interviews, Matthew T. Lee, Margaret M. Poloma, and Stephen G. Post offer a deeper and more nuanced study of religion and benevolence, finding that it is the experience of God as loving that activates religious networks and moves people to do good for others. Lee, Poloma and Post show that, for many Americans, love underlies both authoritative and benevolent images of God. The authors discover that encounters with God's love are frequent-eight out of ten respondents to the survey said that that they had felt God's love increasing their compassion for others-and that such experiences take on very different meanings depending on social context. These encounters can be intensely transformative, both for individuals and their communities. The book provides countless examples of how receiving God's love, loving God, and expressing this love impacted the lives of the Christians they interviewed. Some began to provide community service, others to strive for social justice, still others to seek to redefine religion and the meaning of "church " in America. Many of the interviewees discarded the judgmental image of God they knew as children in favor of a loving and accepting representation of God that is more consistent with their direct, personal, and affectively intense experiences.The Heart of Religion will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in how perceptions of God affect communities in America.

Godly Love: Impediments and Possibilities examines the theory of “Godly Love,” understood as including a vertical axis denoting the love of God and a horizontal axis involving the love of others, is at the core of a new field of research that studies how divine love influences the love of others and vice-versa. It is a multidisciplinary research program into the benevolent expressions of the Great Commandment of the Christian tradition involving the theological and social sciences. Theological and social scientific essays that ask why there is not more Godly Love in this world and what might be done to change the situation. This book focuses on the problems confronting, challenging, prohibiting, and perhaps even resisting the concrete expression of Godly Love in the world, utilizing a range of theological and especially social scientific methodologies.