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Repeatedly over the last century, scientists have described a tension between two different views of their profession, one in which scientific research is a valuable end in itself and a second in which research is merely a means to other goals (such as power, status, or money). This chapter shows how a framework of “communal practices,” drawn from the virtue ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre, can help scholars understand this tension while also creating a more nuanced and accurate view of its source and characteristics. Doing so allows us to take scientists’ accounts of their professional goals seriously without accepting oversimplified binaries, and it suggests ways to navigate the tensions they describe by cultivating virtues.

This chapter reflects on the author's essay, written in 1982, which sums up their views consequent on their researches in usury, martyrdom, yein nesekh, and the laws regulating Jewish–Gentile relationships. The essay emphasizes the lengths to which the Tosafists went to justify communal practice. It also points out that this relentless defense of common practice went hand in hand with, indeed, was sustained by, the ongoing acceptance of the new halakhic demands created by the tosafist dialectic. Medieval halakhic thought, in fact medieval Jewish culture generally, can be divided roughly into four units: Muslim Spain, Ashkenaz, Provence, and Christian Spain. The essay focuses on the uniqueness of the approach to certain problems of law and reality of the Franco-German (Ashkenazic) culture, in contrast to the other three cultures—cultures no less creative, no less daring than that of Franco-Germany, but ones which chose, in the inevitable clash between need and theory, a path wholly different from that of the Ashkenazic community.

Chapter 4 traces the origins of evangelical neo-monasticism and some of its key leaders and institutions, including the Urban Monastery. Against the theological individualism of dominant positions in American evangelicalism, neo-monastic evangelicals have developed holistic communitarianism. Whereas historic American evangelicalism prioritized evangelism, personal salvation, individual moral transformation, and one’s personal relationship with God, Urban Monastery participants believe that working for social justice is no less important than sharing the gospel with individuals. Urban Monastery participants are holistic in their refusal to prioritize evangelism over social justice activism, their support for structural as well as personal solutions to social problems, their refusal of single-issue voting, their efforts to deconstruct the boundaries between the “sacred” and the “secular,” and their understanding of Christian mission in the world. They are communitarian in placing relationships and communal practices, rather than the isolated individual, at the center of religious life.

After questioning and deconstructing the ancient and modern use of the categories ‘pagans’ and ‘heretics’, this chapter puts forward a local religion model as a means of interpreting the local practices condemned and censured by ecclesiastical leaders. The purpose is to show how late antique people were not passive recipients of change but instead actively took part in creative interaction. Many traditional rituals and local communal practices went through a series of metamorphoses in the fourth and fifth centuries. This chapter explores the transformation of rituals, with the focus on the much-disputed topic of sacrifices, including their alleged continuities and disappearances. Late antique church leaders labelled the local forms of religiosity as magic, pagan survivals, or heretical distortions. These interpretations have also influenced modern scholars, who often continue to classify the alternate expressions of religiosity into these three categories.