Ethnography and Subjectivity in Comparative Religious Ethics

The ethnographic turn in religious studies has responded to important developments, such as the rejection of value neutrality and the need to better address the lived experience of individuals and communities. In this essay, I affirm the value of ethnography as a method in comparative religious ethics, but distinguish between two ways of framing ethnography in relation to ethics. The first way insists on the hard limits of translating values across cultures, and tends to marginalize or dismiss normative inquiry. The second way allows for the interpretation of practices of ethical justification in diverse cultural contexts. I argue that this second category of ethnography is more congenial to the work of comparative religious ethicists, since an integral part of ethical inquiry involves reflecting on, and making arguments about, social norms and practices.     

THE PRESENT STATE OF THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS: An Update

A survey of developments over the last forty years suggests that little progress has been made in the development of comparative religious ethics as a discipline. While authors working in this field have produced a number of interesting works, the field lacks structure, including an agreement on the basic purpose, terms, and approaches by which contributions may be evaluated as better or worse. I provide an account of this history, suggesting that a way forward will involve marrying ethicists' interest in arguments with close attention to the more and less formal structures by which groups of people organize the giving and taking of reasons.     

COMPARATIVE ETHICS,IDEOLOGIES, AND CRITICAL THOUGHT1

After the publication of my book and various articles about comparative religious ethics, obstacles in the field's further development seemed to mount as swiftly as practical issues seemed to trumpet the need for global ethics more loudly. Driven by impatience, I wondered if I were fiddling in unending discussion while the planet burned. As others persevered and evolved productively in addressing developmental issues in the field directly, I began to work through the lens of a less direct, but complementary, perspective: ideologies and critical thought. The following essay seeks to connect my parallel approach to ongoing obstacles and solutions within the prolific development of comparative religious ethics, especially its urgent pursuit of common moral grounds sufficient to support peaceful coexistence and living.     

Teaching Comparative Religious Ethics: A Review Essay

Though others have surveyed the different methods in comparative religious ethics, relatively little attention has been given to different approaches to pedagogy (exceptions include Lovin and Reynolds; Juergensmeyer; Twiss). The field of comparative religious ethics has now reached a level of maturity so that there are a variety of ways such courses can be taught. In this review I consider the approaches to comparative religious ethics found in four recent texts by Jacob Neusner, Darrell Fasching and Dell deChant, Regina Wolfe and Christine Gudorf, and Sumner Twiss and Bruce Grelle. In the essay I note the strengths and weaknesses of each text, with special attention given to how the texts might work in the classroom. I then argue that the different texts reflect different understandings of the goal of teaching comparative religious ethics, and I make these goals explicit in order to help teachers decide how they might approach the teaching in this growing field.     

A Peaceful Clash: The U.S. And China: Which Model Holds Out Promise For The Future?

This article analyzes some prospects for the economic and political development of the United States and China. The first part of the article is devoted to the consideration of strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. model and of the Chinese one. The second part of the article considers the most probable scenarios of the future struggle for world leadership. The first scenario suggests that China will continue developing at a faster rate in the several coming decades and will be gradually catching up with the United States in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) production. However, after several crises in 2008–2020 the United States will likely regain a number of advantages over China as a result of assimilation of the newest technologies. The second scenario suggests that the United States will come across a whole range of internal social and political problems related to internal political splits. In this case, the United States will have to share its global leadership with China. The article attempts to answer the following questions: What scenario is more probable? Will the old world order change? What are the main conclusions for the European Union and for Russia?     

Religious freedom and cultural asymmetry: Some pitfalls of secularism

ABSTRACT

Disputes concerning state interference in the religious practices and traditions of citizens have created uproar in public debate in India and Europe during the past decades. The contributors to this colloquium on Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism point to the importance of two domains in addressing these disputes: the comparative study of court decisions and the budding domain of comparative political theory. In this response, I discuss several issues that emerge from these domains and argue that the problem of cultural asymmetry continues to create major pitfalls in the debates on secularism and religious freedom.     

PLURALISM, TOLERATION, AND ETHICAL PROMISCUITY

This paper argues that from an ethical point of view tolerance, which is simply one of a number of possible responses to ethical pluralism, is not an acceptable ideal. It fails to acknowledge and appreciate the good in other forms of life and thereby does not adequately respect the people who live these lives. Toleration limits the range of goods we might appreciate in our own lives and in the lives of those we care most about, and it tends to lead to a number of deformations or personal failures of character. In place of tolerance, we should embrace ethical promiscuity—a view that not only acknowledges ethical pluralism but also offers good reasons to celebrate this state of affairs.     

The Heterological Quest: Michel de Certeau's Travel Narratives and the "Other" of Comparative Religious Ethics

One of the central methodological issues for contemporary practitioners of comparative ethics is how to conceptualize and relate to the "other" encountered in cross-cultural studies. A valuable resource for reflection on this problem is the work of the French historian and cultural theorist Michel de Certeau, whose diverse opus coheres around his notion of heterology—a "science of the other." In this article I explore perspectives on the cultural "other" emerging from Certeau's analyses of a series of "travel narratives" documenting the European encounter with the peoples of the New World. Certeau's meditations on the metaphor of the voyage, the interplay of orality and literacy, the politics of ethnography, and the semiotics of the "return of the repressed" offer, I suggest, important insights for comparative ethicists.     

Comparative Religious Ethics and the Politics of Christian Identity

I present a brief historical narrative of the legacy of Christian ethics in comparative religious ethics (CRE) that attempts to make sense of the tensions within the field from the perspective of the politics of identity with reference to its changing content and practices—its internal history—and what might be called the background conditions—its external history—that shaped not only the content and methods of CRE but also its self‐understanding. Given the politics of Christian identity and the historical development of religious ethics within the American academy, I recommend that scholars of CRE adopt a more confessional mode of inquiry that makes explicit their ultimate commitments.