This accessible book is invaluable to anyone coming to social and political philosophy for the first time. It provides a broad survey of key social and political questions in modern society, as well as clear discussions of the philosophical issues central to those questions and to political thought more generally. Unique among books of this kind, it includes a sustained treatment specifically of social philosophy, including coverage of topics like race and racism, gender, marriage, and the...

The Sermon on the Mount offers a rousing call to political solidarity—if only we have ears to hear it.Being a Christian and being a socialist go together for Phil Christman. He explains why in this stirring manifesto, which is part testimony of his own journey out of conservatism, part entertaining introduction to the American left, and part impassioned call to his fellow believers to take a fresh look at their own politics. Christman speaks particularly to Christi...

Bill Christman had always been an affectionate and confident child, but when he entered first grade he began to be plagued with anxieties and fears. From the moment he awoke, his mind was filled with a single thought: Something bad is going to happen. Over time, he found release in rage and became a serious behavioral problem. By high school, he was getting drunk, fighting all the time, in trouble with the law and, eventually, homeless. He began to seriously consider ending his life.

The first of the Eternal series, a nanopunk novella detailing the lives of Calvin, an amnesiac drifter, and his best friend, a golden retriever named Hobbes.Calvin wants to do something great with his life, but there is just something holding him back. It is more than his frivolous sense of humor or the fact that most of his conversations are with a dog, but he just can't remember...When he tries to be a good Samaritan and stops a crime in progress, he sets in motion a seri...

In a departure from standard approaches to the concept of liberty, in this book John Christman locates and defends the concept of freedom as a fundamental social value that arose out of fights against slavery and oppression. Seen in this light, liberty must be understood as requiring more than mere non-interference or non-domination – it requires the capacity for self-government and the capabilities needed to pursue valued activities, practices, and ways of life. Christman analyses the eme...

It is 2013, and Chris Johnson is a Midwesterner whose word is his reputation. By all accounts, he should be a model member of society. What no one knows is that he is embroiled in a dark world fueled by a dangerous secret. As he prepares to host another meeting for eleven other talented and successful men who worked with him at Newport Industries nearly a decade earlier, Chris knows it will be a few years before the secret bond that holds the group together will become reality. As Chris va...

She wanted him, he wanted her, and they both got what they wanted. Ruth Jackson just started college in Boston when she met Carter, whom she thought was a regular guy going to school. But she was wrong. Carter had a deep dark secret no one knew about.

For better or worse, Navy captain William S. "Deak" Parsons made the atomic bomb happen. As ordnance chief and associate director at Los Alamos, Parsons turned the scientists' nuclear creation into a practical weapon. As weaponeer, he completed the assembly of "Little Boy" during the flight to Hiroshima. As bomb commander, he approved the release of the bomb that forever changed the world. Yet over the past fifty years only fragments of his story have appeared, in part because of his own s...

"He took the blind man by the hand . . . and when he had spit on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, 'Do you see anything?' He said, 'I see men, but they look like trees, walking.' Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again and he saw everything clearly." Mark's account of a blind man needing two healing touches from Jesus graphically depicts the stubborn blindness of his disciples. Peter epitomized this blindness when he was tempted by the popular view that Jesus was the Ro...

Soren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century poetic philosopher, wrote about the encounter with the gospel in a way unmatched in the modern era. He perceived “the possibility of offense” in Jesus’ invitation: “The Halt—Come here now, all you who labor and are burdened, if you suffer most miserably, to be helped into even greater misery!” So, the burdened disciples come to Jesus as the Savior of their nation only to encounter his command to “take up their own Roman cross to follow him...

Walt Whitman's New York: From Manhattan to Montauk, edited by Henry M. Christman, is a captivating exploration of the vibrant New York that inspired one of America's greatest poets. Through Whitman's writings and observations, this book offers a unique perspective on the city and its surroundings during the 19th century, capturing its energy, diversity, and the transformative spirit that fueled his poetic vision. Christman curates an impressive selection of Whitman's prose and poetry, draw...

In the early 19th century, in the Hudson Valley of New York State, hundreds of square miles of land were still the feudal domains of large landowners known as patroons. Such families as the Van Rensselaers, Livingstons, and Schuylers owned the farms and towns in which hundreds of thousands of ordinary people lived and worked. Even the capitol city of New York State, Albany, was encompassed in the private fiefdom of a patroon. On July 4, 1839, in the mountain town of Berne, New York, a mass...