JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS最新文献

In this response to the essays in the symposium on my book Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical I tried to clarify and expand some of the thoughtful and astute themes in the remarks of my interlocutors, especially about how the book was not intended to be about one figure but rather an intervention into postwar American and Israeli Judaism through the lens of a maligned figure who is ignored by most American Jews and demonized by most Israeli Jews. Meir Kahane remains present because he never went away. And he never went away because he offered solutions that, while unpopular and egregious, continue to resonate when Jews begin to feel unstable about their place in America or Israel. He is the dark underside of the modern Jewish project that will not go away.

Recent readings of Kierkegaard's Works of Love have admirably shown how his apparent reservations about romantic love can be deflected on his own terms by imbuing them with some of the moral rigor of neighbor-love. This paper argues however that these readings must be complemented by the reverse argument, which would show how some of the qualities of romantic loves are in fact preserved in neighbor-love. By drawing on his dialectics of sensate love, psychical love, spiritual love, and self-love, I show how Kierkegaard believes neighbor-love should be impartial and yet exhibit some of the character of preferential romantic loves.

Many scholars in religious ethics and political theory read Augustine's emphasis on pride as tied to a pessimism about politics and human nature as well as a neutralist vision of politics. Against these views, this essay argues that Augustine's vision of political humility is at once tied to a thick, non-neutralist vision of the good and a limited view of politics' role in achieving this good on its own. To make this argument, I compare Augustine's largely neglected commentary on Genesis with that of Hobbes, a political pessimist with whom Augustine is often compared. While Hobbes's political combatting of pride adheres to a vision of mere “preservation,” Augustine's instead entails a vision of “re-creation.” Political re-creation is aspirational, participating in a re-instantiation of creation's order, but it is also limited, since (re-)creation is ultimately the work of God.

The Tirukkuṟaḷ is a text of Tamil proverbs that circulates widely in South India today. While the first two sections of the text contain practical pieces of ethical advice, the third section contains an extended love poem. This variation in content has resulted in a dichotomous view of the text in which ethics and poetry are viewed as fundamentally distinct. This paper blurs the distinction between ethics and poetry by showing how the poetic form of the Tirukkuṟaḷ's proverbs not only enhances the text's ethical message but also participates in the ethical formation of the text's audience. Building on Geoffrey Galt Harpham's notion of sub-ethics, I argue that the Tirukkuṟaḷ uses three literary strategies—metaphor, inference, and suspense—to engage the audience in modes of “sub-ethical” reflection by raising ethical questions and framing ethical choices.

In 1952, Rabbi Eliezer Yehudah Waldenberg (a member of the Supreme Rabbinical Court of Israel) and Rabbi Ben Zion Meir Chai Uziel (the Rishon LeTziyon and Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel) addressed the question of incarceration in a Jewish state according to the halakhic tradition. A generation later, Rabbi Chaim David Halevi the Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv-Yaffo) also addressed this question. Their approaches shed light on the way we should be thinking about incarceration in general, and the overwhelming problem of the current moment in the United States: mass incarceration.

The Journal of Religious Ethics has published only two full-length articles focusing on American Indian religious ethics in the last decade. This may signal that the field is uneasy about integrating American Indian religious ethics into its broader discourse. To fill this research lacuna and take a step toward normalizing religious-ethical engagement with American Indian ethics, this article argues that the field needs an intentionally anticolonial, self-aware approach to understanding American Indian religious ethics—one that decenters methods and approaches that may facilitate the analysis of Christian texts, groups, and phenomena, yet limit insights into the religious-moral beliefs and practices of Native Americans. The article first shows examples of how religious-ethical methods, definitions, and epistemological starting points can obfuscate rich and accurate understandings of Native American religious-ethical systems and phenomena. Next, it turns to historical and anthropological studies and Native American philosophy and ethics to outline an interdisciplinary framework for integrating American Indian traditions into the discourses of religious ethics.

This essay develops an argument against eudaimonism in support of John Hare's earlier critique of eudaimonism. In contrast to Hare, who mounts a Kantian-Scotist objection to what he calls a single-source view of motivation in eudaimonism, my critique of eudaimonism focuses on the ground of normative reasons in eudaimonism while also taking a page from Scotus's ethics. I argue that the main issue with eudaimonism is with the ultimate end and manner of our willing, which fails to correspond to the right ordering of love based on the nature of goodness in the object.