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For Homer's audience, the resourceful Odysseus—“known before all men for the study of crafty designs”—is predictable, always the same, always on brilliant display. David, on the other hand, remains mysterious to the story's audience for great portions of the narrative, acting often in a surprising manner. The biblical writer develops character; the Homeric writer demonstrates character. The divine in each story play roles appropriate to each hero, while reflecting their authors' respective sense of character and moral universe. In fact, the relationship of hero to the divine has much to do with the diametrically opposed characterizations of David and Odysseus within their respective stories, and the gulf between implied moral universes. Because of the goddess Athene, Odysseus becomes more of what he has always been. Because of the biblical God, on the other hand, David changes, becoming known to others—and to himself—only as the story unfolds. David and Odysseus inhabit worlds that could not be more different. A brief exploration of notable cave scenes from their respective stories helps to shine a spotlight on the complexity of David, of his God, and of the relationship between the two.

This chapter focuses on violence workers' retrospective social control moralities about their work. It explains that the moral universes of these workers were shaped during the military period by national security ideologies and then nurtured by occupational insularity and personal isolation. Thus, their moral universes have been restructured in the present to render atrocity justifications compatible with Brazil's postmilitary sociopolitical climate. The chapter identifies the strategies of violence workers for explaining and excusing atrocity. These include diffusing responsibility, blaming individuals, citing a just cause, and asserting that professionalism had correctly guided their and other's violence.

This chapter refutes present claims that epidemics in antiquity led to blame of the ‘other’. By assembling contemporary descriptions, explanations, and consequences of ancient epidemics, this chapter overturns a second commonplace about ancient epidemics: that contemporaries understood them within a moral universe, in which plagues arose from the evil deeds of individuals usually within the political sphere, such as betrayals, unjust wars, violations of peace, and breaches of justice, and as a consequence, the gods punished communities with epidemic disease. Such explanations, however, clustered in undatable, mythological time. Instead, classical authors explained the majority of epidemics solely by natural phenomenon—climate, famine, bad food and unaccustomed diets, vapours from unburied corpses, polluted rivers, etc. These explanations did not cast blame on anyone, including the enemies of the afflicted, who may have created the preconditions that brought about these plagues.

Implementing No Child Left Behind (NCLB) continues to be challenging at the district level because people do not automatically do what they are told. This chapter documents the appropriation of NCLB by tracing the linkages between the New York City school district, public schools across five boroughs, city government, and United Education. Integrating the federal and state actions with the more localized interactions, it traces “policy connections between different organizational and everyday worlds, even where actors in different sites do not know each other or share a moral universe.” The chapter provides an investigation into how NCLB creates circumstances that limit the range of possible reactions and outcomes to school failure—and also how NCLB enables the creative and practical management of problems constituted by the uncertainties of the policy. It challenges conventional educational ethnography and educational policy analysis in three important ways, firstly by reducing the gap between everyday actions and activities and government action. Secondly, the chapter concurrently regards the actions of disparate policy stakeholders, including supplemental educational services managers and politicians who foray temporarily into policy processes, and principals whose policy roles persist, often over years. Finally, it expands the field of study to transactional spaces that transcend physical locations.