Principle of Excellence

This book disturbs the "normal" and depoliticized meaning of virtue through a genealogical reading of the debates, conceptual struggles, and ambiguities that were cleansed by virtue ethicists to produce today's conception of excellence. This approach provides the narrative raw material to craft a new meaning of excellence as a creative actualization of the potentials for human prosperity. The fundamental question asked and addressed about excellence is how communities can use excellence as the organizing principle for political and economic development. The author explores how large-scale modern societies can be better administered in environments characterized by contingency and possibilities. At the very least, excellence in societal governance practice should involve the creation of possibilities for community and participation by all its members so that their potentialities can be drawn out for the common good. The book also explores the connection between excellence and creativity. If excellence is the drive toward actualization of potentialities for all human beings, it follows that human creativity is an adequate form for that movement. The author not only attempts to trace and clarify the mystique of the creative functions of persons and social groups, but also shows how the creative functions of human life can express the unconditional eros of divine creativity. In the process of doing all this, the author offers a fresh and provocative perspective of philosophy and theology's oldest concerns: the good, truth, beauty, justice, love, hope, and the eschatological New Creation.

The Principle of Excellence is a startlingly fresh synthesis of intercultural perspective and thought. Wariboko here sets theologian Paul Tillich’s writings in creative conversation with breath-taking array of 21st-century thinkers, resulting in sparkling new insights on Tillich, but also in a daring new vision of what the field of ethics might become. A most welcome contribution to ethics and theology today., Nimi Wariboko's deployment of the idea of excellence for social ethical thinking is both original and refreshing. Excellence is typically identified with virtue ethics, but Wariboko brilliantly demonstrates the richness and wider utility of the idea and its plural semiotic provenances. No doubt, some may find his approach daring and provocative, even stepping on the toes of some major figures in the field, but that is precisely because this is a work that is hard to ignore., Nimi Wariboko opens new theoretical doors on the topic of virtue and excellence, unlocked by his command of classical intellectual traditions interwoven with perspectives born out of his discerning interpretations of his cross-cultural experiences., This interdisciplinary book defies the usual categories. Rather than treating excellence as a virtue (à la MacIntyre), readers will find herein a philosophy of excellence that brings two traditions—one centered in ontology and the other in philosophical anthropology—into dialogue with each other.

Nimi Wariboko is the Katherine B. Stuart Professor of Christian Ethics at Andover Newton Theological School, Newton Center, Massachusetts. His other books include God and Money: A Theology of Money in a Globalizing World, and The Depth and Destiny of Work: An African Theological Interpretation.