front cover of Theater and Integrity
Theater and Integrity
Emptying Selves in Drama, Ethics, and Religion
Larry D Bouchard
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Four decades ago Tom F. Driver brought theater into discussion with religion and modern theology. It has been a rich ongoing dialogue, but one that now demands a bold new engagement. In Theater and Integrity, Larry D. Bouchard argues that while the “antitheatrical prejudice” regards theater as epitomizing the absence of integrity, theater’s ways of being realized in ensembles, texts, and performances allow us to reenvision integrity’s emergence and ephemeral presence. This book follows such questions across theatrical, philosophical, and theological studies of moral, personal, bodily, and kenotic patterns of integrity. 

It locates ambiguities in our discourse about integrity, and it delves into conceptions of identity, morality, selfhood, and otherness. Its explorations ask if integrity is less a quality we might possess than a contingent gift that may appear, disappear, and perhaps reappear. Not only does he chart anew the ethical and religious dimensions of integrity, but he also reads closely across the history of theater, from Greek and Shakespearean drama to the likes of Seamus Heaney, T. S. Eliot, Caryl Churchill, Wole Soyinka, Tony Kushner, and Suzan-Lori Parks. His is an approach of juxtaposition and reflection, starting from the perennial observation that theater both criticizes and acknowledges dimensions of drama and theatricality in life.
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The UN Secretary-General and Moral Authority
Ethics and Religion in International Leadership
Kent J. Kille, Editor
Georgetown University Press, 2007

Once described by Trygve Lie as the "most impossible job on earth," the position of UN Secretary-General is as frustratingly constrained as it is prestigious. The Secretary-General's ability to influence global affairs often depends on how the international community regards his moral authority. In relation to such moral authority, past office-holders have drawn on their own ethics and religious backgrounds—as diverse as Lutheranism, Catholicism, Buddhism, and Coptic Christianity—to guide the role that they played in addressing the UN's goals in the international arena, such as the maintenance of international peace and security and the promotion of human rights. In The UN Secretary-General and Moral Authority, contributors provide case studies of all seven former secretaries-general, establishing a much-needed comparative survey of each office-holder's personal religious and moral values. From Trygve Lie's forbearance during the UN's turbulent formative years to the Nobel committee's awarding Kofi Annan and the United Nations the prize for peace in 2001, the case studies all follow the same format, first detailing the environmental and experiential factors that forged these men's ethical frameworks, then analyzing how their "inner code" engaged with the duties of office and the global events particular to their terms.

Balanced and unbiased in its approach, this study provides valuable insight into how religious and moral leadership functions in the realm of international relations, and how the promotion of ethical values works to diffuse international tensions and improve the quality of human life around the world.

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