Books in the Ethics of Everyday Life series

This text proposes different ways of thinking about work. It explores many of the ways in which human beings have thought about the place of work in life - its meanings, its limits, and its relation to other obligations, to the life cycle, to play and to rest.

This book focuses the reader's attention on great teachers in the act of teaching and on their students in the act of learning. The book challenges us to question our assumptions about ourselves and others as everyday teachers and learners.

Drawing upon a vast range of human experience and reflection, this book seeks to demonstrate how people have tried to cope with the inevitability of death. Different cultures teach people to respond to their own death and the death of others in different ways.

The editors of this book argue that there are no longer socially prescribed forms of conduct that help guide young men and women in the direction of matrimony. The volume offers an anthology of source readings in response to the contemporary cultural silence surrounding love and marriage.

Despite current concerns for "family values" and the dissolution of marriages, Amy A. and Leon R. Kass see very little attention being paid to what makes for marital success. They argue there are no longer socially prescribed forms of conduct that help guide young men and women in the direction of matrimony; the very concepts of "wooing" and "courting" seem archaic. Yet they see major discontent with the present situation and detect among their students certain longings-for friendship, for wholeness, for a life that is serious and deep, and for associations that are trustworthy and lasting-longings they do not realize could be largely satisfied by marrying well. Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Courting and Marrying is an anthology of source readings offered as a response to the contemporary cultural silence surrounding love that leads to marriage. It addresses important questions that emerge not from theory, but from practice: Why marry? Is this love? How can I find and win the right one to marry? What about sex? Why a wedding and the promises of marriage? What can married life be like? Using readings taken mainly from classic texts of Homer, Herodotus, Plato, Aquinas, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Austen, Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, Miss Manners, and many others, this collection challenges our unexamined opinions, expands our sympathies, elevates our gaze. It offers a higher kind of sex education, one that prepares hearts and minds for romance leading to lasting marriage, and introduces us to possibilities open to human beings in everyday life that may be undreamt of in our current philosophizing. This unapologetically pro-marriage anthology is intended to help young people of marriageable age and their parents think about the meaning, purpose, and virtues of marriage and, especially, about finding the right person with whom to make a life.