Carl Plantinga is Senior Research Fellow at Calvin University. Among his books are Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement (2018) and Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator's Experience (2009).

Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
by Carl Plantinga
I. Moral Understanding
1. Clarifying Moral Understanding
by Ted Nannicelli
2. Understanding (mis)understanding: Sally be a Lamb
by Paul C. Taylor
II. Transfer and Cultivation
3. Phenomenal Experience and Moral Understanding: A Framework for Assessment
By Carl Plantinga
4. The Slow, Subtle, Small Effects of Filmic Narrative on Moral Understanding
by Helena Bilandzic
5. Moral Conflict, Screen Stories, and Narrative Appeal
by René Weber and Frederic Hopp
6. How Screen Stories Can Contribute to the Formation of Just Persons
by Nicholas Wolterstorff
III. Affect
7. Affect and Moral Understanding
by Robert Sinnerbrink
8. Morality and Media: The Role of Elevation/Inspiration
by Mary Beth Oliver
IV. Character Engagement
9. Media Characters and Moral Understanding: Perspectives from Media Psychology
by Allison Eden and Mathew Grizzard
10. Movies, Examples, and Morality: The Rhetoric of Admiration
by Noël Carroll
V. The Reflective Afterlife
11. What Roles Can Audiences Play in Generating Moral Understanding?
by James Harold
12. On Reflecting on Reflections: The Moral Afterlife and Screen Studies
by Wyatt Moss-Wellington
13. The Reflective Afterlife and the Ends of Imagining
by Murray Smith
Index

The stories we tell and show, in whatever medium, play varied roles in human cultures. One such role is to contribute to moral understanding. Moral understanding goes beyond moral knowledge; it is a complex cognitive achievement that may consist of one or more of the following: the ability to understand why, to ask the right questions, categorization, the application of models to specific incidents, or the capacity to make connections between morally charged situations that have a common underlying meaning.
While the disciplines of communication, psychology, philosophy, and film and media studies have all made significant scholarly progress on this issue, they make different grounding assumptions and use different terminologies. Screen Stories and Moral Understanding approaches the topic from an interdisciplinary perspective and explores the conditions under which stories we view on screens-movies, streamed series, and television-can lead to moral understanding in viewers.
In five sections, this book explores the nature of moral understanding in relation to screen stories, the means by which moving image fictions can transfer knowledge to and cultivate perspectives in viewers, the role of affect in generating moral understanding, the viewer's engagement with characters, and what we do with screen stories after viewing them.