Abstract:Returning to John P. Reeder's 1978 essay on “Religious Ethics as a Field and Discipline,” this essay explores debates surrounding the original intentions for the Journal of Religious Ethics (JRE) and for the field of religious ethics, as these have played out over the decades among an influential group of scholars involved with the JRE since its inception: Arthur Dyck, Ronald Green, Stanley Hauerwas, and Jeffrey Stout. While the JRE and its founding mission are in need of ongoing critique and transformation, w… Show more
“…But within the guild's self‐reflections, little has been explicitly argued for to tackle the deeper question of the field's justification. Instead, the lion's share of the guild's self‐interpretation has focused on the proper protocols for carrying out work in the field, having us attend to its identity, organizing concepts, appropriation of intellectual traditions, material resources, or research paradigms in the study of religion and ethics (see Little and Twiss 1978; Green 1978, 1997; Editors 1979; Reeder 1978, 1997; Bird 1981; Stout 2004; and Schweiker 2005).…”
Section: Critical Pluralism and Religious Ethicsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…This effort has been an especially urgent task given that religious ethics is a relatively new field of scholarship. Considerable thought has thus been devoted to distinguishing religious ethics from work in moral philosophy, the philosophy of religions, the sociology of religion, the history of religions, and interfaith dialogue (for instance, Little and Twiss 1978; Green 1978; Hindery 1978; Reeder 1978; and Twiss and Grelle 1998). Regarding such matters, the central questions have been: What are the distinctive markers of religious ethics (see Kelsay 2012)?…”
Section: Critical Pluralism and Religious Ethicsmentioning
This essay addresses the questions, “what good is religious ethics for?” and “what justification exists for the field?” in three steps. First, it canvases how religious ethicists have offered reasons for carrying out work in the field to identify an Anti‐Reductive Paradigm that is guided by an Egalitarian Imperative. That imperative functions as a thin, minimal morality of inclusivity and equal respect that guides work in the field. Second, the essay considers the field's ends. Here the focus shifts from values that shape the field's methods to values that can describe the field's purposes. That shift requires us to think in terms of a thick rather than a thin morality, one with substantive rather than procedural virtues in mind. The essay offers a constructive, substantive proposal under the rubric of Critical Humanism. Critical Humanism justifies the study of religious ethics as an enterprise that can expand the moral imagination through its encounter with difference. It is shaped by four values: post‐critical reasoning, social criticism, cross‐cultural fluency, and environmental responsibility. Third, the essay brings the two parts of the argument together by explaining how to connect such purposes to the thin morality of inclusivity and equal respect. One upshot of the essay is to have us think not only about values, but also about power as it pertains to scholarship in the guild; hence the attention to the ethics and politics of religious ethics.
“…But within the guild's self‐reflections, little has been explicitly argued for to tackle the deeper question of the field's justification. Instead, the lion's share of the guild's self‐interpretation has focused on the proper protocols for carrying out work in the field, having us attend to its identity, organizing concepts, appropriation of intellectual traditions, material resources, or research paradigms in the study of religion and ethics (see Little and Twiss 1978; Green 1978, 1997; Editors 1979; Reeder 1978, 1997; Bird 1981; Stout 2004; and Schweiker 2005).…”
Section: Critical Pluralism and Religious Ethicsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…This effort has been an especially urgent task given that religious ethics is a relatively new field of scholarship. Considerable thought has thus been devoted to distinguishing religious ethics from work in moral philosophy, the philosophy of religions, the sociology of religion, the history of religions, and interfaith dialogue (for instance, Little and Twiss 1978; Green 1978; Hindery 1978; Reeder 1978; and Twiss and Grelle 1998). Regarding such matters, the central questions have been: What are the distinctive markers of religious ethics (see Kelsay 2012)?…”
Section: Critical Pluralism and Religious Ethicsmentioning
This essay addresses the questions, “what good is religious ethics for?” and “what justification exists for the field?” in three steps. First, it canvases how religious ethicists have offered reasons for carrying out work in the field to identify an Anti‐Reductive Paradigm that is guided by an Egalitarian Imperative. That imperative functions as a thin, minimal morality of inclusivity and equal respect that guides work in the field. Second, the essay considers the field's ends. Here the focus shifts from values that shape the field's methods to values that can describe the field's purposes. That shift requires us to think in terms of a thick rather than a thin morality, one with substantive rather than procedural virtues in mind. The essay offers a constructive, substantive proposal under the rubric of Critical Humanism. Critical Humanism justifies the study of religious ethics as an enterprise that can expand the moral imagination through its encounter with difference. It is shaped by four values: post‐critical reasoning, social criticism, cross‐cultural fluency, and environmental responsibility. Third, the essay brings the two parts of the argument together by explaining how to connect such purposes to the thin morality of inclusivity and equal respect. One upshot of the essay is to have us think not only about values, but also about power as it pertains to scholarship in the guild; hence the attention to the ethics and politics of religious ethics.
“…28 There are too many to list here, but some highlights include the essays found in the special 25th anniversary issue, Journal of Religious Ethics 1998, as well as Decosimo 2010; Hauerwas 2003; Kelsay 2012;Reeder 1978;Schweiker 2006;and Stalnaker 2008. See also JRE 47:4, cited above.…”
Section: The Emergence Of Religious Ethics: What Are We Comparing?mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…As Reeder observes,Indeed, the sense of a distinctive field and discipline of religious ethics (whether seen as a tradition‐by‐tradition enterprise or one that is cross‐traditional or both) may be a function of the widespread assumption that there is a basic natural law, over and above which there is “something more” that it is the job of religious ethicists to handle. (1978, 175)If Mahoney's Aquinas and Hauerwas's Niebuhr are the authentic representatives of natural law reasoning, then it should come as no surprise that Christian ethics would undergo a profound identity crisis when confronted by secular ethics. As Porter writes, “we sometimes assume that a theologian is confronted with more or less well‐defined secular or philosophical alternatives, to which she must accommodate Christian perspectives through some kind of supplementation or correlation, or else, which she must clearly reject in favor of a self‐standing theological system of beliefs and practices” (2012, 172).…”
Section: Natural Law and Secular Ethicsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Indeed, the sense of a distinctive field and discipline of religious ethics (whether seen as a tradition‐by‐tradition enterprise or one that is cross‐traditional or both) may be a function of the widespread assumption that there is a basic natural law, over and above which there is “something more” that it is the job of religious ethicists to handle. (1978, 175)…”
In this essay, I argue that Christian ethicists should not think of themselves as religious ethicists. I defend this claim by arguing that the concept of religious ethics, as it has come to be understood as a discipline that is distinct from secular ethics, is incoherent. In part one, I describe the fraught attempts by theologians in the 20th century to identify the distinctiveness of Christian ethics. In part two, I argue that certain accounts of natural law unwittingly reinforce a problematic conception of secular ethics. Part three examines some trends in religious studies and comparative religious ethics to highlight problematic conceptions of religion. Drawing together these strands of inquiry, I contend that that the secular‐religious dichotomy in contemporary ethics should be rejected, but by the same token, I suggest that comparative ethics remains a worthwhile enterprise.
This essay explores the intersections of religious ethics and American religious history and advocates for a transdisciplinary approach to scholarship in both disciplines. Four books, each published within the last 4 years, form the foundation of this discussion by modeling distinctive elements of transdisciplinary scholarship: Heathen: Religion and Race in American History by Kathryn Gin Lum; Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism by Peter Coviello; Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts Against Domestic Violence by Juliane Hammer; and The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics by Janet R. Jakobsen. Each of these texts raises questions that hover at the intersections of religious ethics and American religious history, demonstrating how scholarship in both areas can be strengthened through a destabilization of the disciplines themselves.
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