A Reformed theologian on a journey on a surpassing road

Abstract

Peer-review declarationThe publisher (AOSIS) endorses the South African 'National Scholarly Book Publishers Forum Best Practice for Peer-Review of Scholarly Books'. The book proposal form was evaluated by our Theological and Religious Studies editorial board. The manuscript underwent an evaluation to compare the level of originality with other published works and was subjected to rigorous two-step peer-review before publication by two technical expert reviewers who did not include the author and were independent of the author, with the identities of the reviewers not revealed to the author. The reviewers were independent of the publisher, editor(s) and author. The publisher shared feedback on the similarity report and the reviewers' inputs with the manuscript's author to improve the manuscript. Where the reviewers recommended revision and improvements, the author responded adequately to such recommendations. The reviewers commented positively on the scholarly merits of the manuscript and recommended that the book be published. v Research justificationMany recent empirical studies regarding morality in political and public life in South Africa indicated that the community is in an overall state of moral decay. Hope for a peaceful and prosperous future fades away, especially among the youth and the unemployed. The main thesis of this study is to analyse the moral crisis and to propose a moral compass that can direct the community to become a community of character and hope where people can enjoy a flourishing life. The proposed moral compass is applied to the spheres of life which are the main drivers of moral formation and the forces that impede such formation, for example, dehumanisation, racism, violence, family destruction, economic injustice, poor leadership and lack of moral agency. After studying the recent global research projects about the moral character of decoloniality, human dignity, economic justice, family life, leadership, nation-building and reconciliation, I propose a moral compass that can direct the nation out of its moral decay. This study assumes that Christian ethics, assisted by global ethics, can be beneficial for the design of the moral compass. This scholarly study is an original literary comparative study because of the use of the most recent sources in social ethics and the results of major national and international empirical studies about the social trends of our time. This book reflects on these new empirical research results in social sciences relating to social awareness, experiences, leadership quality, expectations of the citizenry, violent behaviour and trends of moral decay. The answers I propose to these social trends and conditions are mostly novel propositions to academics in the field of social ethics, with the aim of adding value to the discourse about moral agency in South Africa. This is thus a book written by a scholar in ethics, and the target audience is other scholars interested in studying effective and practical methods of bringing moral renewal to South African so...