Alterity,Intimacy, and the Cultural Turn in Religious Ethics

This essay responds to four critics of Friends and Other Strangers: Studies in Religion, Ethics and Culture: Diana Fritz Cates, Eric Gregory, Ross Moret, and Atalia Omer. Focusing on the book’s organizing concepts of intimacy and alterity, engagement with empirical sources, discussion of Augustine’s thought, and attention to moral psychology and political morality, these interlocutors take up various strands in the book’s argument and extend them into metaethical, normative, and metadisciplinary domains. The author organizes his response under three rubrics: Metaethics and Personal Relationships; Political Morality; and Multidisciplinary Horizons.     

The mazes of practicing and the horizons

Teaching must take account of young people's individual needs and talents; it must develop their desire for criticism and effort. The spiritual framework must therefore rest on values of rationality and sensitivity. Morality must rest on the notion of personal dignity. In this way, we shall be able to create a horizon, a goal which can inject meaning into life.     

Evolution of sciences and education

We have to fight against scientism if we are to escape from the clutches of an omni‐present techno‐science. But we must also answer the yearning for meaning. A solid general culture, an ability to discern and to resist, a return to epistemology are all ways of putting science back in its real place.     

Persian tales on the couch: Notes on folktales as the mirror of the contemporary cultural struggles with gender and sexuality

Abstract

This paper presents a report on our psychoanalytic investigation of cultural folktales, myths, and fables, in which we study, primarily, the extent to which such narratives lurk behind contemporary representations of men and women. Our aim is to identify the multiple narrative structures that form the core plots and storylines of these tales. Following Roland Barthes’ work on mythologies, we want to decode the tales’ ideological components by deciphering the axiomatic assumptions these tales make about the nature of perceived social reality. This represents an attempt to study a mind that is derived from the text. More specifically, we study narratives whose storylines revolve around the struggle between men and women in order to identify the culture’s core concerns about and preoccupations with the relationship between the sexes. We believe that cultural myths or folktales are a royal road to a nation’s collective conscience, and include gendered patterns of defenses, obsessions, fears, and paranoia.     

THE MORAL AND POLITICAL BURDENS OF MEMORY

Memory brings the past into the present. It is a feature of human temporality, contingency, and identity. Attention to memory's psychological and social importance suggests new vistas for work in religious ethics. This essay examines four recent works on memory's importance for self-interpretation, social criticism, and public justice. My focus will be on normative questions about memory. The works under review ask whether, and on what terms, we have an obligation to remember, whether memory is linked to neighbors near and distant, how memory is related to justice and forgiveness, and whether memory sits easily with the kind of relationships that allegedly characterize life in democratic public culture.     

Recentering Christian Ethics as Comparative Religious Ethics

The filial relationship between Christian ethics and Comparative Religious Ethics (CRE) need not be perniciously distortive and can be salutary for comparative work. I suggest that the suspicions about CRE as a disguised form of a “Christian ethical enterprise” are overstated and that we can appreciate the value of the legacy of Christian ethics for comparative work in the focal themes of emancipatory criticism and common morality. Both of these themes, even if influenced by Christian ethics, reflect more universal social‐moral problems that can be discerned in cross‐cultural contexts.