Unrighteousness in the Steward of Unrighteousness parable adheres to a business tycoon whose steward is forced to act cannily on his own behalf, a stratagem that in an ideal future world will no longer be necessary. Underlying are deceptive actions involving money that Joseph had his steward take against the brothers, which nonetheless resulted in reconciliation among Israel’s first family.

The conclusion summarizes the book’s arguments concerning the influence of polarization and the fracturing of norms on the judicial process, and also its remedial suggestions.

Introduces the book through a discussion of two cases. The first is Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, and in which the dissenting justices suggested that the majority’s decision to do so was unwise. The second is Rucho v. Common Cause, in which the Court concluded that courts lack the capacity to resolve claims concerning excessive partisanship in gerrymandering. Together, the cases help illustrate the book’s themes: the inescapable role of judgment in judicial decision-making and the accumulation of ways in which changes in courts, the legal profession, and the culture more broadly have come to undermine judgment’s role.

This chapter tracks the hierocratic version through revisions of the manna and rock-water episodes (Exodus 16–17) and the scouts episode (Numbers 13–14), but its primary focus is a new version that begins at the sea (Exodus 14). This version is tracked through another revision of the scouts episode and readings of the episodes involving bitter water (Exodus 15), divine fire, quail, objection to Moses’s foreign wife (Numbers 11–12), and snakes (Numbers 21). The bitter water episode bypasses Aaron as mediator of torah and introduces the wilderness as a period of testing. The divine fire episode decentralizes the sanctuary and provides a way to mitigate threat of divine wrath as Moses intercedes with God. The quail episode initially protects Aaron’s control of meat consumption but is revised to reimagine the structure of Israel’s political leadership. Miriam’s complaint initially construes ritual impurity as a punishment for sin and transforms social isolation into banishment, but a revision sidelines Aaron and reestablishes Moses as a trustworthy mediator. Finally, God, the divine healer, prescribes the manufacture of a snake icon, which does not instill fear-driven obedience but prompts viewers to studiously reflect on uses and abuses of sovereignty.

Even though the theme of return migration is specific to Ezra–Nehemiah, the concept of social displacement appears throughout the Old Testament from the banishment from Eden, through ancestral journeys and multiple exiles from Samaria and Judah. Thus, the multivalent theology of Ezra–Nehemiah engenders a broader dialogue with the rest of the Old Testament.

This concluding chapter revisits some of the main themes of the book. Transition expertise is discussed through the lenses of cognitive adaptability, personal intelligences, contextual intelligence, and motivation. Career transitions are discussed through the themes of self concept evolution and identity change. The methodological characteristics of the study are evaluated, including its limitations. The questions of control group, nontransitions, and failed transitions are addressed. Finally, avenues of future research are proposed, including self-efficacity and self-control, resiliency, and wisdom. The discussion is informed by the retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

The purpose of the Protreptic section – the subject of this chapter – is to ensure that Alcibiades will not abandon his newly manifest sense of self and its correlative longing sparked in the previous section; it is to continue his transformation so that he might actively seek the desiderata to which he has been awakened. Revealed to himself imbued with a yearning for desiderata he is unable to comprehend much less pursue, the young man remains hesitant. Socrates challenges Alcibiades with the story about the King of Persia and the kings of Sparta in order to argue it is peculiar to Athenians to pursue wisdom. The Neoplatonic student’s interpretation for the entirety of this middle section of the dialogue is framed accordingly: attempting to intensify the young man’s newly awakened eros, Socrates replaces honour with wisdom as the ultimate goal for which philosophical initiates must strive.

This chapter turns to Augustine’s account of his own Christian conversion in Confessions. It offers a new account of what Augustine thought it meant to be a Christian – in particular, this chapter finds that the idea of God as the saviour of sinners (and therefore the giver of virtue) stood at the heart of Augustine’s conception of Christianity. This finding allows this chapter to show that Augustine’s intellectual and moral conversion coincided in the garden in Milan and also that Augustine made his criticisms of Manicheanism and Platonism from within the eudaimonist tradition.

This chapter describes, through attention especially to Augustine’s De trinitate, how Christ’s humanity comes to be the point of redemptive mediation between humanity and divinity through the reference of creaturely signs to him. Christ’s flesh is made the unsurpassable redemptive sign as all other creaturely signs come to point to it; yet because Christ’s flesh is shaped through its receptivity to the world, and because the existence and agency of each creature is included within its ability to point to the sign of Christ’s flesh, we must say that creation is given a role to play in God’s redemptive work.

This chapter concerns itself with the Sophists’ professional activities. Their professionalism – especially the claim that they were first to teach for pay – has often been used as the only meaningful characteristic to distinguish them from other wisdom experts. When reviewing the evidence for their professional activities, however, a different picture emerges, one in which the Sophists appear to be less exceptional and more embedded in a broader economy of wisdom than has hitherto been realized. The chapter reviews the primary sources and discusses the difficulty of reconstructing the Sophists’ professional lives based on authors who, like Plato, seem hostile and frequently mention the Sophists in invective contexts. By paying attention to the Sophists’ professional activities, we can gain a better understanding of their social position and the cultural legitimacy accorded them by their contemporaries. How we interpret their professional activities can further help shape our understanding of their contribution to Greek philosophy and their intellectual legacy.

This chapter concerns the pursuit of aretē among the sophists. It argues that such pursuit did not mean what it came to mean to Plato and his heirs. For the latter, the goal of human life, called eudaimonia, is personal flourishing; and aretē is used to refer to some highly valued psychological condition crucial to achieving eudaimonia. The sophists use aretē to refer to a psychological condition once. Predominantly, they use aretē to refer to a life of civic success, conceived as success in public affairs, saliently involving the agent’s making significant positive contributions to his fellow citizens and polis. As such, sophistic ethics tends to be civic ethics. Granted this, there is limited evidence of anti-civic ethics among the Sophists. Given traditional views of the Sophists, the locus of this evidence is ironic. It consists of attributions to the Socratic Aristippus and content in the Athenian Antiphon’s On Truth.

This chapter locates the Sophists within the context of earlier Greek wisdom traditions and efforts by a variety of individuals (from Hesiod to Parmenides and Pindar) to establish and communicate their own poetic and/or intellectual authority. The Sophists participated in long-standing debates over the relationship between sophia and technê, and over tensions surrounding physical versus intellectual skills, learning, and teaching. They also looked back to the practice of wisdom and maxim collection. There was no dominant tradition under which one could unify the manifestations of sophia in Archaic and early Classical Greece; this complexity was an important aspect of the sophistic inheritance, and is the background against which we must measure individual efforts to claim distinctive achievement. The analysis traces the importance of Hesiodic and quasi-Hesiodic wisdom collections, the emergence of the inquiry into nature and of intellectual and cultural experts known as “sages” (sophoi), and the representation of sophia in sympotic and epinician poetry.

This chapter presents the ideas, concepts, and terminology of "The basic teachings of the Buddha" as they are found in the earliest sources of the Pali texts and the Theravada tradition.