Gambling

Mapping the American Moral Landscape

Alan Wolfe, Erik C. Owens, Alan Wolfe, Erik C. Owens

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781602581951
• eBook ISBN:
  9781602585126
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Why has gambling become so accepted in the U.S. when other historical vices, like smoking and drinking, continue to evoke morality-based opposition? That simple but intriguing question guides this path-breaking volume, the first interdisciplinary academic study of gambling. Led by the renowned Alan Wolfe and with essays by experts at the country's premiere centers in public policy, clinical addiction, law, gaming, psychology, sociology, moral philosophy, theology, and the arts, Gambling: Mapping the American Moral Landscape is a tour de force of the booming cultural and moral phenomenon that has become woven into the fabric of American life. Both an attempt to understand and an effort to predict its future consequences, the book will prove evocative and critical reading for American civic and church leaders, activists, historians and government officials.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title, Title Page, Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Importance of a Good Cause: Ends and Meansin State Lotteries
• 2. The Politics of Sovereignty and Public Policy toward Gambling
• 3. Negotiating a Different Terrain: Morality, Policymaking, and Indian Gaming
• 4. New Politics, Same Old Vice: Gambling in the Twenty-first Century
• 5. Behavioral and Brain Measures of Risk-Taking
• 6. Gambling with the Family?
• 7. Gambling and Morality: A Neuropsychiatric Perspective
• 8. The Unproblematic Normalization of Gambling in America
• 9. The Memory of Sin: Gambling in Jewish Law and Ethics
• 10. Grace and Gambling
• 11. The Criminal Law of Gambling: A Puzzling History
• 12. Playing and Praying: What’s Luck Got to Do with It?
• 13. Beyond Pathology: The Cultural Meanings of Gambling
• 14. Civic Values and “Education Lotteries”: The Irony of Funding Public Education with Lottery Revenues
• 15. A Tale of Two "Sins": Regulation of Gambling and Tobacco
• 16. The Culture War Issue That Never Was: Why the Right and Left Have Overlooked Gambling
• Notes
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index