UDM Libraries Book of the Week

By Mario Mikulincer and Phillip R. Shaver Humans are universally concerned with good and evil, although one person’s “evil” can be another person’s “good.” How do individuals arrive at decisions about what is right and what is wrong? And how are these decisions influenced by psychological, social, and cultural forces? Such questions form the foundation of the field of moral psychology. In trying to understand moral behavior, researchers historically adopted a cognitive-rationalistic approach that emphasized reasoning and reflection. However, a...

By Gregory D. Sumner In Unstuck in Time, Gregory Sumner guides us, with insight and passion, through a biography of fifteen of Kurt Vonnegut’s best known works, his fourteen novels starting with Player Piano (1952) all the way to an epilogue on his last book, A Man Without a Country (2005), to illustrate the quintessential American writer’s profound engagement with the “American Dream” in its various forms. Sumner gives us a poignant portrait of Vonnegut and his resistance to celebrating...

By John Rowland Smith Learn to ride a bicycle with Einstein, have your first kiss with Kant, get your first job with Adam Smith, and weather midlife with Dante. Let history’s greatest minds illuminate life’s turning points.In Breakfast with Socrates, Robert Rowland Smith brought the power of philosophy down to earth by proving, in a very engaging and entertaining way, that human moments meet big ideas on a regular basis. Now Smith offers the natural offspring of that book, expanding...

By Thomas Massarro For over a decade Living Justice has introduced readers to Catholic social teaching. Grounded in scripture, theology, reason, and experience, these faith-based principles for promoting justice and peace in modern society have inspired a remarkable burst of social activism in recent decades. The second classroom edition has been revised and updated throughout while maintaining the book’s accessible introduction to both the foundations of Catholic social teaching and social justice in the world today. Living Justice leads readers...