In this constructive theological analysis of safety, theologian Jeremy Lundgren addresses the conceptual development of safety through premodern, early modern, and late modern settings and gives practical guidance on how to faithfully engage the pursuit of safety in the present day.

Drawing on research in men's long-term, maximum-security prisons, this book examines three interconnected problems: the tendency of the prison to obscure other social problems and conceal its own failings, the pursuit of greater levels of human security through repressive and violent means and the persistence of the belief in the problem of 'evil'.

Written by intelligence scholars and experts, this book chronicles the evolution of the CIA: its remarkable successes, its controversial failures and its clandestine operations. The history of the agency is presented through the prism of its declassified documents, with each being supplemented by insightful contextual analysis.

What does the collapse of sub-prime lending have in common with a broken jackscrew in an airliner’s tailplane? Or the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico with the burn-up of Space Shuttle Columbia? These were systems that drifted into failure. While pursuing success in a dynamic, complex environment with limited resources and multiple goal conflicts, a succession of small, everyday decisions eventually produced breakdowns on a massive scale. We have trouble grasping the complexity and normality that gives rise to such large events. We hunt for broken parts, fixable properties, people we can hold accountable. Our analyses of complex system breakdowns remain depressingly linear, depressingly componential - imprisoned in the space of ideas once defined by Newton and Descartes. The growth of complexity in society has outpaced our understanding of how complex systems work and fail. Our technologies have gotten ahead of our theories. We are able to build things - deep-sea oil rigs, jackscrews, collateralized debt obligations - whose properties we understand in isolation. But in competitive, regulated societies, their connections proliferate, their interactions and interdependencies multiply, their complexities mushroom. This book explores complexity theory and systems thinking to understand better how complex systems drift into failure. It studies sensitive dependence on initial conditions, unruly technology, tipping points, diversity - and finds that failure emerges opportunistically, non-randomly, from the very webs of relationships that breed success and that are supposed to protect organizations from disaster. It develops a vocabulary that allows us to harness complexity and find new ways of managing drift.

In The Pursuit of Happiness, the latest addition to the Brookings FOCUS series, Carol Graham explores what we know about the determinants of happiness, acrossand within countries at different stages of development. She then takes a look at just what we can do with that new knowledge and clearly presents both the promise and thepotential pitfalls of injecting the "economics of happiness" into public policymaking.This burgeoning field, largely a product of collaboration between economists and psychologists, is gaining great currency worldwide. One of a handful of pioneers to studythis topic a mere decade ago, Graham is understandably excited about how far the concept has come and its possible utility in the future. The British, French, and Braziliangovernments already have introduced happiness metrics into their benchmarks of national progress, and the U.S. government could follow suit. But "happiness" as a yardstick to help measure a nation's well-being is still a relatively new approach, and many questions remain unanswered.The Pursuit of Happiness spotlights the innovative contributions of happiness research to the dismal science. But it also raises a cautionary note about the issues that stillneed to be addressed before policymakers can make best use of them. An effective definition of well-being that goes beyond measuring income-the Gross National Productapproach-could very well lead to improved understanding of poverty and economic welfare. But the question remains: how best to measure and quantify happiness? While scholars have developed rigorous measures of well-being that can be included in our statistics-as the British are already doing-to what degree should we use such metrics to shape and evaluate policy, particularly in assessing development outcomes?Graham considers a number of unanswered questions, such as whether policy should be more concerned with increasing day-to-day contentment or with providing greater opportunity to build a fulfilling life. Other issues include whether we care more about the happiness of today's citizens or that of future generations. Policies such as reducing our fiscal deficits or reforming our health care system, for example, typically require sacrificing current consumption and immediate well-being for better long-run outcomes. Another is whether policy should focus on reducing misery or raising general levels ofwell-being beyond their relatively high levels, in the same way that reducing poverty is only one choice among many objectives in our macroeconomic policy.Employing the new metrics without attention to these questions could produce mistakes that might undermine the long-term prospects for a truly meaningful economics of well-being. Despite this cautionary note, Graham points out that it is surely a positive development that some of our public attention is going to better understanding and enhancing the well-being of our citizens, rather than emphasizing the rootsof their divide.

Since its creation in 1947, the CIA has been at the heart of America's security apparatus. Written by intelligence scholars and experts, The CIA and the Pursuit of Security offers the reader a lively survey of the CIA past and present. The history of the agency is presented through the prism of its declassified documents, with each being supplemented by insightful contextual analysis. The book chronicles the evolution of the CIA, its remarkable successes, clandestine operations, and its ongoing struggle to maintain American security in an age of proliferating threats.