The Punishment Of Virtue

As a former star reporter for NPR, Sarah Chayes developed a devoted listenership for her on-site reports on conflicts around the world. In The Punishment of Virtue, she reveals the misguided U.S. policy in Afghanistan in the wake of the defeat of the Taliban, which has severely undermined the effort to build democracy and allowed corrupt tribal warlords back into positions of power and the Taliban to re-infiltrate the country. This is an eyeopening chronicle that highlights the often infuriating realities of a vital front in the war on terror, exposing deeper, fundamental problems with current U.S. strategy.

Michael Meranze uses Philadelphia as a case study to analyze the relationship between penal reform and liberalism in early America. In Laboratories of Virtue, he interprets the evolving system of criminal punishment as a microcosm of social tensions that characterized the early American republic. Engaging recent work on the history of punishment in England and continental Europe, Meranze traces criminal punishment from the late colonial system of publicly inflicted corporal penalties to the establishment of penitentiaries in the Jacksonian period. Throughout, he reveals a world of class difference and contested values in which those who did not fit the emerging bourgeois ethos were disciplined and eventually segregated. By focusing attention on the system of public penal labor that developed in the 1780s, Meranze effectively links penal reform to the development of republican principles in the Revolutionary era. His study, richly informed by Foucaultian and Freudian theory, departs from recent scholarship that treats penal reform as a nostalgic effort to reestablish social stability. Instead, Meranze interprets the reform of punishment as a forward-looking project. He argues that the new disciplinary practices arose from the reformers' struggle to contain or eliminate contradictions to their vision of an enlightened, liberal republic.

Virtue Is Its Own Punishment is the story of a boy's journey of growth and discovery from childhood through college at Brigham Young University. It is not about religion so much as it is a story of growing up in the culture of small town, Utah, Mormon society. The author is a wry social commentator whose humorous depiction of coming of age will appeal to Mormons, ex-Mormons, and other participants in restrictive cultures. Highlights include full-immersion baptism, beliefs about Heaven, avoiding missionary work, and learning about girls and technical virginity. Ever wondered what it's like to grow up Mormon? This entertaining memoir is a look inside Mormonism in the 1950s when the most pressing concern of boys everywhere is who would get to be Roy Rogers and who would be Gene Autry in schoolyard games. Later, going on a mission is the pre-ordained destiny of 18-year-old boys regardless of their inclination toward missionary work. The author's tumultuous years at Brigham Young leads to a poignant end to the first part of his life, and a shaky new start to the second. This is a story of innocence preserved and paradise lost-written by one of America's funniest writers. Encouraged as a boy to be perfect, the narrator finds the path to perfection to be a bumpy road. Which isn't to say he doesn't give it a shot, foreswearing alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and even cola drinks in order to curry favor with his elders, friends and neighbors in the LDS community, and especially with girls. Alas, in college the road only becomes bumpier as romantic fantasies remain just fantasies and the chastity belt begins to feel more like a straitjacket. Without really wishing for it to happen, Richard eventually finds himself on the outside of the institution looking in, a reluctant heretic. But not all suffering is for naught. In fact, when it comes to raw material for an inventive, insightful and irreverent memoir, Mormonism is a treasure trove of raw material.

"In the course of his study of vengeance as a moral concept, French exposes important distinctions between types of moral theories (karmic and non-karmic) and between people who are morally handicapped and those who are morally challenged. He examines concepts relevant to vengeance, such as honor, moral authority, and evil, and issues such as the rationality of revenge and proportionality in punishment."--BOOK JACKET.

Winner of the 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest. "I can’t imagine a more important book for our time." —Sebastian Junger The world is blowing up. Every day a new blaze seems to ignite: the bloody implosion of Iraq and Syria; the East-West standoff in Ukraine; abducted schoolgirls in Nigeria. Is there some thread tying these frightening international security crises together? In a riveting account that weaves history with fast-moving reportage and insider accounts from the Afghanistan war, Sarah Chayes identifies the unexpected link: corruption. Since the late 1990s, corruption has reached such an extent that some governments resemble glorified criminal gangs, bent solely on their own enrichment. These kleptocrats drive indignant populations to extremes—ranging from revolution to militant puritanical religion. Chayes plunges readers into some of the most venal environments on earth and examines what emerges: Afghans returning to the Taliban, Egyptians overthrowing the Mubarak government (but also redesigning Al-Qaeda), and Nigerians embracing both radical evangelical Christianity and the Islamist terror group Boko Haram. In many such places, rigid moral codes are put forth as an antidote to the collapse of public integrity. The pattern, moreover, pervades history. Through deep archival research, Chayes reveals that canonical political thinkers such as John Locke and Machiavelli, as well as the great medieval Islamic statesman Nizam al-Mulk, all named corruption as a threat to the realm. In a thrilling argument connecting the Protestant Reformation to the Arab Spring, Thieves of State presents a powerful new way to understand global extremism. And it makes a compelling case that we must confront corruption, for it is a cause—not a result—of global instability.

In Aquinas’s Eschatological Ethics and the Virtue of Temperance, Matthew Levering argues that Catholic ethics make sense only in light of the biblical worldview that Jesus has inaugurated the kingdom of God by pouring out his spirit. Jesus has made it possible for us to know and obey God’s law for human flourishing as individuals and communities. He has reoriented our lives toward the goal of beatific communion with him in charity, which affects the exercise of the moral virtues that pertain to human flourishing. Without the context of the inaugurated kingdom, Catholic ethics as traditionally conceived will seem like an effort to find a middle ground between legalistic rigorism and relativistic laxism, which is especially the case with the virtue of temperance, the focus of Levering’s book. After an opening chapter on the eschatological/biblical character of Catholic ethics, the ensuing chapters engage Aquinas’s theology of temperance in the Summa theologiae, which identifies and examines a number of virtues associated with temperance. Levering demonstrates that the theology of temperance is profoundly biblical, and that Aquinas’s theology of temperance relies for its intelligibility upon Christ’s inauguration of the kingdom of God as the graced fulfillment of our created nature. The book develops new vistas for scholars and students interested in moral theology.

Abdul Zaeef describes growing up in poverty in rural Kandahar province, which he fled for Pakistan after the Russian invasion of 1979. Zaeef joined the jihad in 1983, was seriously wounded in several encounters and met many leading figures of the resistance, including the current Taliban head, Mullah Mohammad Omar. Disgusted by the lawlessness that ensued after the Soviet withdrawal, Zaeef was one among the former mujahidin who were closely involved in the emergence of the Taliban, in 1994. He then details his Taliban career, including negotiations with Ahmed Shah Massoud and role as ambassador to Pakistan during 9/11. In early 2002 Zaeef was handed over to American forces in Islamabad and spent four and a half years in prison in Bagram and Guantanamo before being released without charge. My Life with the Taliban offers insights into the Pashtun village communities that are the Taliban's bedrock and helps to explain what drives men like Zaeef to take up arms against the foreigners who are foolish enough to invade his homeland.

Responsibility. Courage. Compassion. Honesty. Friendship. Persistence. Faith. Everyone recognizes these traits as essentials of good character. In order for our children to develop such traits, we have to offer them examples of good and bad, right and wrong. And the best places to find them are in great works of literature and exemplary stories from history. William J. Bennett has collected hundreds of stories in The Book of Virtues, an instructive and inspiring anthology that will help children understand and develop character -- and help adults teach them. From the Bible to American history, from Greek mythology to English poetry, from fairy tales to modern fiction, these stories are a rich mine of moral literacy, a reliable moral reference point that will help anchor our children and ourselves in our culture, our history, and our traditions -- the sources of the ideals by which we wish to live our lives. Complete with instructive introductions and notes, The Book of Virtues is a book the whole family can read and enjoy -- and learn from -- together.