Offering the first interdisciplinary engagement with what it means to study the good as a fundamental aspect of social life, this volume brings together theoretical contributions and ethnographic case studies from leading international scholars to address the following questions: What does it mean to study the good as an aspect of social and cultural life? How does focusing on the good enhance and refocus social theory? How do different disciplinary perspectives on the good challenge and enrich each other? To what extent is the concept of the good analytically and conceptually productive, and how should we situate this in relation to debates surrounding the study of ethics and values? What are the interrelations between between power and inequality and a ‘politics of hope’, between suffering and moral aspiration, and between the ethical and the political?With case studies looking at the good in particular related to ethics in general, ethics in a Jewish ethnography, the morality that results in a post-conflict context, and the social life of moral symbols, this is a diverse and wide-ranging collection bound tightly by the central focus of how we can think about the good from a variety of disciplinary angles. This will be of importance to students of Christian ethics, philosophy, anthropology and sociology.