Why is gambling so accepted in the U.S. while other historical vices, such as smoking and drinking, continue to evoke morality-based opposition? That simple but intriguing question guides this pathbreaking volume, the first interdisciplinary academic study of gambling. Led by the renowned Alan Wolfe and Erik Owens with essays by experts at the country's premiere centers in public policy, clinical addiction, law, gaming, psychology, sociology, moral philosophy, theology, and the arts, Gambling: Mapping the American Moral Landscape is a tour de force examination of this booming cultural and moral phenomenon that is so intricately woven into the fabric of American life. Both an attempt to understand gambling and an effort to predict its future consequences, the book is evocative and critical reading for American civic and church leaders, activists, historians, and government officials.

Contents:

I. The Politics and Policy of Gambling

1. The Importance of a Good Cause: Ends and Means in State Lotteries

2. The Politics of Sovereignty and Public Policy toward Gambling

3. Negotiating a Different Terrain: Morality, Policymaking, and Indian Gaming

4. New Politics, Same Old Vice: Gambling in the 21st Century

II. Individual Behavior and Social Impact

5. Behavioral and Brain Measures of Risk-Taking

6. Gambling with the Family?

7. Gambling and Morality: A Neuropsychiatric Perspective

8. The Unproblematic Normalization of Gambling in America

III. Theology, Gambling, and Risk

9. The Memory of Sin: Gambling in Jewish Law and Ethics

10. Grace and Gambling

11. The Criminal Law of Gambling: A Puzzling History

12. Playing and Praying: What s Luck Got to Do with It?

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A compelling and deeply felt exploration and defense of liberalism: what it actually is, why it is relevant today, and how it can help our society chart a forward course.

The Future of Liberalism represents the culmination of four decades of thinking and writing about contemporary politics by Alan Wolfe, one of America’s leading scholars, hailed by one critic as “one of liberalism’s last and most loyal sons.” Wolfe mines the bedrock of the liberal tradition, explaining how Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, and other celebrated minds helped shape liberalism’s central philosophy. Wolfe also examines those who have challenged liberalism since its inception, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to modern conservatives, religious fundamentalists, and evolutionary theorists such as Richard Dawkins.

Drawing on both the inspiration and insights of seminal works such as John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?,” and Mill’s On Liberty and The Subjection of Women, Wolfe ambitiously sets out to define what it truly means to be a liberal. He analyzes and applauds liberalism’s capacious conception of human nature, belief that people outweigh ideology, passion for social justice, faith in reason and intellectual openness, and respect for individualism. And we see how the liberal tradition can influence and illuminate contemporary debates on immigration, abortion, executive power, religious freedom, and free speech.

But Wolfe also makes it clear that before liberalism can be successfully applied to today’s problems, it needs to be recovered, understood, and embraced—not just by Americans but by all modern people—as the most beneficial way to live in our complex modern world. The Future of Liberalism is a crucial, enlightening, and immensely rewarding step in that direction....

American religion—like talk of God—is omnipresent. Popular culture is awash in religious messages, from the singing cucumbers and tomatoes of the animated VeggieTales series to the bestselling "Left Behind" books to the multiplex sensation The Passion of the Christ. In The Transformation of American Religion, sociologist Alan Wolfe argues that the popularity of these cartoons, books, and movies is proof that religion has become increasingly mainstream. In fact, Wolfe argues, American culture has come to dominate American religion to such a point that, as Wolfe writes, "We are all mainstream now." The Transformation of American Religion represents the first systematic effort in more than fifty years to bring together a wide body of literature about worship, fellowship, doctrine, tradition, identity, and sin to examine how Americans actually live their faith. Emphasizing personal stories, Wolfe takes readers to religious services across the nation-an Episcopal congregation in Massachusetts, a Catholic Mass in a suburb of Detroit, an Orthodox Jewish temple in Boston-to show that the stereotype of religion as a fire-and-brimstone affair is obsolete. Gone is the language of sin and damnation, and forgotten are the clear delineations between denominations; they have been replaced with a friendly God and a trend towards sampling new creeds and doctrines. Overall, Wolfe reveals American religion as less radical, less contentious, and less dangerous than it is generally perceived to be....