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ix Acknowledgments As in the past, so once again now: I am much indebted to the faculty, staff, and students of the Department of Communication and the Program for Bioethics, Health, and Society, School of Medicine, Wake Forest University, for providing me with communities that make teaching and research an immense joy. Special thanks are due to Nathan Bedsole and Sylvia Shank, who served as student research assistants for this project. I also wish to thank the twenty-three undergraduate and graduate students who were enrolled in my 2011 fall semester course, Communication Ethics, for their willingness to read and critique developing versions of the manuscript. Their candor and support were invaluable. Special thanks are also due to Pat Arneson, Ron Arnett, Calvin Schrag, and Eric Watts for the reality checks that they offered when reading certain chapters. Carey Newman, editor of Baylor University Press, and his talented staff were always there, too, whenever encouragement and practical wisdom were needed; special thanks to Diane Smith and the copyeditor, Carrie Watterson. Indeed, all of these people never failed to provide me with openings for enlightened thought. x • Acknowledgments The present book advances ideas set forth in three previous works: The Call of Conscience: Heidegger and Levinas, Rhetoric and the Euthanasia Debate (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2006), and Perfection: Coming to Terms with Being Human (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2010). I refer to these books in my writings as a trilogy because of how they work together to advance a philosophy of communication ethics. In writing the present book so that it would build on this philosophy, I found it useful to cut, paste, and revise a small amount of material (totaling about fifteen pages of text) that is contained throughout the nearly one thousand pages of the trilogy. In so doing, I hope to facilitate a synthesis of the philosophy without overwhelming readers with technical discourse, an approach I hope will be helpful to them in acquiring the necessary background for appreciating the philosophy that informs and is informed by my discussion and critical assessment of openings. I am grateful to the university presses noted above for their permission to use this material. The reader is thus given both a condensed version of the trilogy and a good deal of additional material to think about concerning its central topics and their relationship to openings. ...

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