JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS最新文献

How do abstract doctrinal ideas become visible and meaningful in the lives of religious practitioners? This article approaches this question by examining the diary of the Tibetan pilgrim Khatag Zamyak (kha stag 'dzam yag) (1896–1961) to explore how he engages with the idea of karma. Scholars of Buddhism often define karma as a law of cause and effect that is fundamental to Buddhist ethics, but this third-person approach to understanding karma can lead scholars to overlook what it feels like to live in a world structured by karma. This article explores how Khatag Zamyak confronts the fact that he does not know his own karma and how he undertakes specific practices to be able to see and tell stories about his own karma. It further argues that Khatag Zamyak's process of engaging with karma is integral to his formation as an ethical subject.

In the spirit of this group of articles commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Journal of Religious Ethics, dealing with tradition-based reasoning, this article takes up a passage from Deuteronomy 20 that allows the “fearful and faint-hearted” person not to participate in battle, as well as the rabbinic and medieval appropriations of this passage in the Jewish tradition. It argues that this verse gives primacy to affect in a way that complicates standard interpretations of the Jewish tradition on just war and allows us to see the pliability of tradition. Finally, the article argues that scholars assessing the justice of conflicts need to attend to the circulation of affects in a reasoning community, as is currently happening on scholarship on moral injury.

The present article proceeds in three parts: first, I describe George F. Hourani's approach and its continued relevance in the study of Islamic ethics. Next, I demonstrate the weaknesses of Hourani's approach, particularly his commitment to mapping Islamic thought anachronistically onto a menu of “isms” derived from modern ethical theory. To highlight the urgency of reexamining Hourani's approach and influence, I also demonstrate how scholars' continued reliance upon Hourani perpetuates the limitations of his approach in the study of Islamic ethics today. Finally, I call attention to the ongoing efforts of scholars in the study of Islamic ethics to do better. I conclude that if Islamic ethics is to thrive, the field must reexamine its reliance on Hourani.

Religious ethics was founded on a commitment to inclusion, welcoming projects from and about different religious and philosophical traditions. This paper argues that the increasing welcome of feminist ethics in the JRE also reveals a tension in the field between inclusion and critique: where feminist ethics is included as another tradition of ethical inquiry, its critical claims can be escaped by appeal to difference from the traditions it seeks to engage. The response to feminist critique should not be to applaud its inclusion without responding to its claims. Where this occurs, religious ethicists must renegotiate the terms of inclusion and the borders of difference. Feminist critique thus requires a return to founding questions of this journal, and the field, about the terms on which different traditions can be discussed and engaged in a common, critical conversation of religious ethics.

This article considers the methodological limits and possibilities of a cultural turn in comparative religious ethics by “translating” the Latin American Indigenous meanings of buen vivir (living well), a subsistent mode of interdependent flourishing resistant to Western models of extractive development amid the Anthropocene. It problematizes the methodological challenge of translating Indigenous cultures from within a Western colonial political economy that has historically relegated Indigenous Americans to the primitive level of savage inferiority according to a stadial theory of socioeconomic development. However, constructive methodological options for translating Indigenous cultures emerge from the Journal of Religious Ethics's existing conversations about comparative religious ethics. On the one hand, recent critical anthropology and ethnography, abetted by intellectual history, provide tools for ethicists in the recovery of Indigenous critiques and meanings against longstanding Western cultural patterns. On the other hand, nativizing the concept of the religious classic thematizes the normative dimensions of Indigenous cultures, demonstrating how the translation of buen vivir points to intercultural dialogue rather than cooptation and manipulation.

Religious ethics, like its sibling, religious studies, emerged out of the divinity schools and theological seminaries in the mid-20th century. Many years have now passed since these academic disciplines have secured independent standing in universities and colleges, independent from their theological beginnings. The time seems right, then, to ask what theological inquiry might gain from religious ethics and what religious ethics might look like when done in a theological mode. Reflection on the manumission scene in the 15th chapter of John's gospel, on the exegetical puzzles it poses, offers one possible example of these gains and this mode.