Joshua J. Yates, director of the Program on Global Culture at the University of Virginia Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, and James Davison Hunter, the institute's executive director and LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture and Social Theory in the College of Arts & Sciences, editors, "Thrift and Thriving in America: Capitalism and Moral Order from the Puritans to the Present." Oxford University Press.

August 29, 2011 — With the economic crises the U.S. is currently facing, this book offers an analysis of what it means to thrive, in essays that include historical depth and interdisciplinary breadth – and take readers beyond the current political polarizations of right and left.

In this volume, the editors bring together a collection of groundbreaking essays from leading scholars on the importance of thrift to American culture and history.

Thrift is a powerful and evolving moral ideal, disposition and practice that has indelibly marked the character of American life since its earliest days. Thrift remains, if perhaps in unexpected and counter-intuitive ways, intensely relevant to the complex issues of contemporary moral and economic life.

"Thrift and Thriving in America" provides insight into evolving meanings of material wellbeing, and of the good life and the good society more generally, and will serve as a resource on a notion that has and will continue to shape and define American life.