The chapter examines the cultural contact between the Waorani indigenous group and Ecuadorian society that occurred between the years 1950 and 1970. The Waorani are a group of 4,000 hunter-gatherers from the Amazon jungle that remained in voluntary isolation until the arrival of missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). Historically, the Waorani were represented as the “other”; the savage with a history of attacking neighboring indigenous people and the nascent Ecuadorian oil industry that wanted to exploit indigenous territories with the support of American evangelists. Among the strategies and consequences of evangelization were population movements, a reduction of enemy tribes in a single territory, infections and deaths from diseases, the expansion of the community’s agricultural and economic frontiers (colonization and extractivist industry), and socioeconomic changes. The Waorani responses reflected a sui generis interpretation of the Christian message that attempted to reconcile distinct universes of meaning and significance. The chapter highlights the recorded testimonies of the first Waorani converts and accounts from SIL missionaries.

The ‘framing’ goods of life, sociality and rationality constitute necessary formal conditions of all the other, namely non-formal, goods. They are also intrinsically good; indeed, without any one of them, one ceases to be a human altogether. Life has absolute priority as a framing good, and is distinct from health (since one can be living and ill). After canvassing Aquinas’s and Finnis’s justification of life as a basic good, I offer my own bipartite justification in terms of life as both a ‘transcendent’ and ‘immanent’ human function. As to sociality, humans are essentially animals who live-in-relation, in the rich sense of developing various intentional relations to the world. If they fail to develop these, they become disabled (disability being a dysfunction and hence natural bad). I then detail various forms of sociality (which Aristotle calls philia, often translated ‘friendship’), along with the perfections or goods they embody. Last, I broach the framing good of rationality. This should be understood not as a virtue (either practical or theoretical), but rather as the ‘immanent character of human being and its form or mode of living-in-relation’. I explore its content in detail in Chapter 7.

The primary source at the center of this chapter’s analysis is produced by a Colombian evangelical pioneer and focuses on the expulsion of his family and the evangelical church in the village of La Tulia, Valle, Colombia, in 1949. The autobiographical account, written some years after the event, recounts memories of the experience and its interpretation considering what it meant for him to be an evangelical Christian in Colombia in the mid-twentieth century. The expulsion occurred against the backdrop of a struggle between liberals and conservatives that involved the Catholic Church and the evangelicals, resulting in an unraveling of the social fabric of the communities where the evangelical presence was very important. Pedro Aguirre, author of the text, was the founder of the town of La Tulia, Valle, and a social and liberal leader who, after having supported the construction of the Catholic temple, abandoned Catholicism for Protestantism. The analysis aims to identify the elements at play in the construction of evangelical memories, which will facilitate not only the use of the source itself but also a deeper understanding of the context in which it was produced.

Reflecting on the enduring impact of early Evangelicals in Latin America, the epilogue highlights how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reformers challenged Catholic dominance and advocated for religious freedom and biblical literacy while also reflecting the biases of their colonial context. It traces the evolution of the region’s religious landscape from Catholic hegemony to one defined by pluralism that was shaped by Evangelical growth, the rising number of religious unaffiliated (“nones”), and shifting church-state relations. It concludes by recognizing that despite these transformations, Latin America remains deeply religious, continuing to express faith as a visible element of identity and public life.

This book examined the evolution of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr’s ideas with careful attention to change and continuity with normative Shi‘i conceptions of political and religious authority, doctrine, and practice. It analyzed his reformulation of Islam’s place in Middle Eastern modernities by investigating discursive themes, issues, and features with reference to the broader Arab regional context and cultural currents, twentieth-century Iraqi experiences, Shi‘i Iraqi encounters with the state, and the Najafi milieu in which Sadr operated. The study traced the central intellectual traditions, relevant discourses, and political, social, and economic contexts that shaped Sadr’s intellectual activity. It thereby identified the interactions between contextual and discursive influences that explain the very change and continuity between his project and established Shi‘i religious norms. It located Sadr’s efforts and achievements within the broader realm of not only Shi‘i but also Arab, Sunni, modernist, and Islamic thought and explored the predominant force of Marxist ideology and communist politics in his articulation of an Islamic program. These hitherto understudied factors helped fashion his conceptualization of modernity and modernization and contributed to his endeavor to reform essential Shi‘i doctrines and praxis.

This chapter examines Sadr’s Falsafatuna and Iqtisaduna as seminal Islamic responses to the ideological and philosophical upheavals of mid-twentieth-century Iraq. Against the backdrop of the radical political transformations that culminated in the 1958 July Revolution and the subsequent contest over Iraq’s national identity – between Pan-Arab and territorial nationalists, communists, and Islamists – Sadr sought to articulate a civilizational project rooted in Islamic metaphysics, social ethics, and epistemology. Through a rigorous critique of Marxist materialism, Western empiricism, and behavioral psychology, he constructs a modern Islamic philosophy grounded in rationalist epistemology and natural theology. Engaging with Sunni revivalist thought, Arab existentialism, and emerging discourses in psychology and economics, Sadr formulated elements of an Islamic moral economy and philosophical paradigm that confronted the ideological pluralism of his time. His work repositions metaphysics within the intellectual struggle for decolonization and articulates a modern Islamic worldview aimed at promoting theism, spiritual renewal, and social justice.

I begin with the bodily good of health, which perfects our organic functioning beyond the rudimentary level required for life. I detail how such functioning operates at different bodily levels, e.g., within cells, tissues, vessels, glands etc. I then move on to bodily abilities, which (not being autonomic functions) reflect the exercise of agency or voluntary control. Such abilities can be divided into active and passive powers, these affording a wider relation to the world in virtue of their intentionality. The third topic is bodily beauty. I argue that this is not a bodily perfection, since it is beholden less to our bodily powers or their configuration than to judgements of character and the social context in which our bodies operate. Finally, I explore body alteration. This constitutes a spectrum, from (perfective) medical intervention to (imperfective) mutilation, with what I call mere body ‘modification’ in the middle. I conclude with two cases that are difficult to place on this spectrum: namely male circumcision and cosmetic ‘surgery’. I argue that the former is likely a bodily imperfection or bad and the latter likely bound up with further imperfections.

In order to develop my own theories of goodness and goods, I investigate ten modern analytic theories, which fall into five types. (1) The first type is represented by G. E. Moore and W. D. Ross, who characterise goodness as a simple, non-natural, indefinable property. This leaves them, I argue, with an apodictic and incomplete list of goods. (2) John Finnis and David Brink build on this non-naturalism, maintaining that goods are discovered properly by (practical) reason. But the mode of this discovery is too a prioristic or rationalistic. (3) Derek Parfit and Sophie Grace Chappell offer what I call ‘under-theorised’ theories of goods. Parfit’s ‘objective list’ theory is highly stipulative, while Chappell’s theory relies on claims about what happens to motivate people. (4) James Griffin and Richard Kraut propose welfarist theories. This reduction of goods to goods-for misconstrues human flourishing as a substantive, observable, phenomenon and fails to deal with what I call ‘refractory’ desires. (5) Last, I look at two ‘quasi-Aristotelian’ theories, those of Hurka and Nussbaum. These both go wrong by rejecting Aristotle’s teleological naturalism, and Nussbaum’s theory is too narrowly political.

This chapter revisits Sadr’s production from the mid-1970s until his execution in 1980, analyzing two overlooked texts – Manabi‘ al-Qudra fi al-Dawla al-Islamiyya and Al-Madrasa al-Qur’aniyya – that challenge portrayals of Sadr as an unequivocal supporter of Khomeini and Wilayat al-Faqih. These writings reflect Sadr’s engagement with Arab Leftist thought and Marxist determinism, as well as his commitment to developing a political theology centered on human agency. In contrast to Khomeini’s model of absolute clerical guardianship, Sadr advanced a participatory theory of Islamic government. His writings articulated the cultural and civilizational aims of Islamic governance. Notably, Sadralso staged a rare intervention on veiling and gender norms, marking a striking but forgotten episode. The chapter situates Sadr’s thought within ideological currents of the 1970s, including intra-Shi‘i debates in Iraq, the emergence of the Islamic Left, and evolving conceptions of turath (heritage). It argues that Sadr’s vision represented a distinctive alternative to both leftist models and clerical authoritarianism: a Shi‘i Islamic framework for cultural renewal, moral agency, and constitutionalism. By theorizing an Islamic notion of free will and social contract, Sadr carved out a critical space within post-1967 Arab political thought – one that remains vital to rethinking modern Islamic political thought.

The Introduction summarises my book’s contents and highlights its key themes. I will argue that there is a human nature, from which flow a raft of ‘pre-moral’ (or ‘ultimate intrinsic’) goods. My Aristotelian (teleological and essentialist) theory of ‘natural perfectionism’ is, I will argue, compatible with Darwinism and subsequent evolutionary biology. It is not an account of normativity across the board, however. Specifically, it does not tackle the manifold quandaries that arise in the domain of practical reason; it does not treat supernatural goods (supposing these to exist); and it does not examine natural perfections in plants or the lower (non-human) animals. Two cautionary notes: first, my book treats perfectionism in the philosophical, not the colloquial, psychological, sense; more specifically, it elaborates a perfectionism of powers or faculties. Second, by focusing on powers or faculties, it avoids the pseudo-essentialisms of class, race, nation, sex etc. Last, I tackle three values that are absent from my book: namely, autonomy, pleasure and wellbeing. These cannot be natural perfections, I argue, because they fall short of being ultimate intrinsic goods.

In one of the most macabre scenes of modern Iraqi history, just moments before Saddam Husayn’s execution on December 30, 2006, spectators chanted and jeered in the death chamber. Saddam mocked the crowd’s chants for Muqtada Sadr: “Is this the bravery of the Arabs?” The crowd retorted, “Long live Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr!” The viral shaky cell-phone footage of this spectacle captured onlookers celebrating the meting out of what they viewed as poetic justice. For, when challenged, the crowd deployed the powerful memory of the martyrdom of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr – the Shi‘i cleric and Iraqi intellectual executed at the hands of the Ba’th regime on April 9, 1980. Hours after Saddam met the same fate he had inflicted on Sadr in the aftermath of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Iraq’s national security adviser Muwaffaq al-Rubay‘i appeared on national television to hail a new era for Iraq, He proclaimed: “This dark page has been turned over … Saddam is gone. Today Iraq is an Iraq for all the Iraqis, and all the Iraqis are looking forward.”1 Since 2003, as Iraqis have negotiated what an Iraq for all Iraqis means, many political and social actors have called upon the thought, activism, and martyrdom of Sadr; the difficulty being that his rich oeuvre and symbolism offer a reservoir of meaning and paths forward.