NEVER A MOMENT’S TRUCE: ESSAYS IN PERFECTIONISM is a collection of interanimating essays that explore moral perfectionism as a moment of moral maturity within any ethical tradition. While developing that claim, the essays assembled explore issues such as attention, accountability, moralism, and the imagination as well as the very idea of perfection and its theological and non-theological roots. While each essay is topical in nature, a recurring cast of authors appear throughout including Baldwin, Beauvoir, Cavell, Diamond, Emerson, King, Murdoch, Nietzsche, and Thoreau.
Rock Face, Two Raptors, Dozier Bell
A FERMENT OF EXISTENCE: FRIENDSHIP & THE BETTER LIFE is an extended meditation on the nature of friendship and its import for ethical life. Through short essays, aphorisms, and scholarly contestations, I argue that friendship provides vital goods including {1} companionship, concrete, believable recognition, support in the form of reassurance, material care, and exhortation, and provocation. I further argue that friendship exposes dynamics essential to ethical life and provides a mature model of a goodwill that eludes Nietzsche’s critique of morality and is preferable to models of morality derived from the rule of law.