Civic virtues, public service, and personal sacrifice and responsibility have again become vital questions for Americans struggling with the moral and political problems of citizenship. In Cultivating Citizens Dwight Allman and Michael Beaty bring together some of America's leading social and political thinkers to address the question of civic vitality in contemporary American society. The resulting volume is a serious reflection on the history of civil society and a rich and rewarding conversation about the future American civic order.

In Cultivating Citizens Dwight Allman and Michael Beaty bring together some of America's leading social and political thinkers to address the question of civic vitality in contemporary American society. The resulting volume is a serious reflection on the history of civil society and a rich and rewarding conversation about the future American civic order.

What happens when the world in which people have crafted identities for themselves and lived their lives suddenly disappears? How does a person -- or a nation -- confront such a shock? From 1990 to 1993, at an unparalleled moment in German history, Olaf Georg Klein interviewed almost a hundred fellow former East German citizens, probing their experiences of the sudden collapse of the German Democratic Republic, then crafting that material into twelve first-person narratives. The result is a literary account whose narrators include representatives from the cities and the countryside, from...

Is the judicial execution of the innocent permissible to deter crime? Some advocates of consequentialism would respond yes, while moral absolutists argue that certain kinds of conduct, including this one, are absolutely prohibited, no matter what the consequences. This is the first collection that does justice to absolutism in its richness and subtleties.