A classic political philosophy text, available againThe revival of political philosophy has frequently assumed that a theory of human well-being and fulfillment is necessary, preoccupied with questions of epistemology and technical conceptual analysis. In instances where the nature of the human good is considered, the paradigm of autonomous individualism customarily dominates. In Character, Community, and Politics, Cochran moves away from these prevailing ...

Religious crosses the spheres of both the private life and the public institution. In a liberal democracy, public and private interests and goals prove to be inseparable. Clarke Cochran’s interdisciplinary study brings political theory and the sociology of religion together in a fresh interpretation of liberal culture. First published in 1990, this analysis begins with a reassessment of the nature of the "public" and the "private" in relation to the political. The controversy over religion...

Should the wall of separation between church and state be permeable or inviolable? This question has been hotly contested since the nation's founding and contentious debates persist today. With a collection of the most significant documents and an introduction by Clarke E. Cochran that provides the historical context of the debate, prominent scholars Mary Segers and Ted Jelen debate the impact of organized religion on the democratic process, examine its influence on political discourse, an...

Sheed & Ward, in partnership with the Commonweal Foundation and with funding from the Pew Charitable Trust, proudly presents the first of two volumes in a groundbreaking series called American Catholics in the Public Square. The result of a three-year study sponsored by Pew aimed at understanding the contributions to U.S. civic life of the Catholic, Jewish, mainline and evangelical Protestant, African-American, Latino, and Muslim communities in the United States, the two volumes in this se...

The British welfare state has been a political and ideological battleground since its inception, yet many of the voices in the crucial debates have been lost in orthodox histories. First published in 1987, Ideologies of Welfare (now with a new preface by the authors) explores the development of the welfare state through the debates which surrounded it in three key periods—the turn of the century; the Beveridge period; and the 1970s and 1980s. Each section focusses on four main and...

A distinctive and original analysis of how the politics of the UK and the lives of British citizens have evolved in the first decades of the twenty-first century, this book provides an interdisciplinary critical examination of the roots, ideology and consequences of austerity politics, the Brexit vote and the rise of populist politics in Britain.Bringing together case studies and perspectives from an array of international researchers across the social sciences, it dissects the way...

The Stoics are known to have been a decisive influence on early Christian moral thought, but the import of this influence for contemporary Christian ethics has been underexplored. Elizabeth Agnew Cochran argues that attention to the Stoics enriches a Christian understanding of the virtues, illuminating precisely how historical Protestant theology gives rise to a distinctive virtue ethic. Through examining the dialogue between Roman Stoic ethics and the work of Martin Luther, John Calvin, a...

After two decades of relative peace following the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the Brexit referendum in 2016 reopened the Northern Ireland question. In this thoughtful and engaging book, Feargal Cochrane considers the region's troubled history, from the struggle for Irish independence in the nineteenth century to the present. New chapters explain the reasons for the suspension of devolved government at Stormont in 2017 and its restoration in 2020, as well as the consequences for Northern...

Tea Medicine is an exploration of health and healing through shared Tea sessions. In this seminal work, we come calling like students at the master’s door. And Tea responds. The aim of this book was to recreate what it’s like to be a Tea apprentice, as far as the written word can capture. In each session, the reader arrives to share some Tea and another lesson.