Three centuries of white minority rule in South Africa has left the African majority materially and psychologically impoverished. A record of mismanagement and widespread corruption have resulted in the state’s failure to meet the needs…
The neighborhood may be conceived as an intermediate space, a location between the private and the public. Here, an individual extends the immediate and private space of human interaction. The people populating this space are…
The meaning of “community” changes as human societies develop new social and political orders. This is true of any term: a part of it remains tethered to past meanings, and a part grows in response…
It is one thing to expound the conceptual anatomy of virtue ethics as articulated in Islamic traditions of moral philosophy, mysticism, jurisprudence, etc.; it is another to examine how such articulations are extended and enacted…
In The Book of Pious Abstention (Kitāb al-Waraʿ) Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (d. 855 CE) is asked what to do if one is in a mosque during Ramadan and a person comes around with (burning) incense…
This piece is a response to the initial query of the project on Virtue Ethics and the Cultivation of the Moral Self by Martin Nguyen. In this first response essay, I briefly analyze the state…
Many of Islam’s leading principles are premised on the idea of the responsibility, individual or collective, of the faithful to be useful members of society and be good to their fellow humans, which is also…
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber argued that it was the Protestant religious ethic, more particularly Calvinism, that acted as a precursor to modern Capitalist economic development, as it saw…
Moral theology can be understood as the science of cultivating human virtue in relation to a recognized set of absolute, divine, or transcendent principles. Considered both theoretically and practically, the cultivated virtues are simultaneously a…
This post and that of Prof. Maria Dakake mark the official beginning of our respective but interrelated inquiries into contemporary Islamic moral theology. Over the course of the next two years, we will each facilitate…