THE PRESENT STATE OF THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS: An Update
John Kelsay
Abstract: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 argu… Show more
“…So long as this description holds, the contributions to knowledge made by scholars of comparative religious ethics will remain marginal, at least as compared with those of historians, philosophers, linguists, or people working in any of the natural sciences. (Kelsay , 583–84)Kelsay argues that scholars working in what has been called the “third wave” of CRE (Bucar ) have not made much headway in legitimizing and systematizing the comparative study of religious ethics as a discipline. Kelsay's claim of disciplinary deficiency is meant to be provocative, but its justification is unconvincing, trading on a number of suppressed premises.…”
Section: John Kelsay's Assessment Of the Present State Of Crementioning
confidence: 99%
“…So long as this description holds, the contributions to knowledge made by scholars of comparative religious ethics will remain marginal, at least as compared with those of historians, philosophers, linguists, or people working in any of the natural sciences. (Kelsay , 583–84)…”
Section: John Kelsay's Assessment Of the Present State Of Crementioning
confidence: 99%
“…Kelsay's narration of the lack of development of CRE in the last thirty‐five years trades on his appraisal that scholars in the field do not agree on what he alternatively describes as a classification scheme, taxonomy, typology, and universal structure (Kelsay , 583–84, 590, 593). However, it is far from clear (1) why fields of study should be understood in linear “progressive” terms (2012, 593), (2) why universal agreement on a theoretical framework is necessary for productive work in the first place, and (3) what sort of theoretical constructs or categories would be sufficient.…”
Section: John Kelsay's Assessment Of the Present State Of Crementioning
confidence: 99%
“…John Kelsay (2010b, ) and Jung Lee () have recently published review articles in the Journal of Religious Ethics arguing that comparative religious ethics (henceforth “CRE”) has gone astray in a variety of ways over the last few decades. Both refer to a “third wave” of CRE scholarship, which they respectively judge as having made little progress (Kelsay , 584) and having failed to live up to its theoretical aspirations (Lee , 556). Both also single out for criticism a line of comparative scholarship centered on virtue ethics and personal formation.…”
mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…We begin with Kelsay's () negative assessment of CRE as a whole, which we argue turns on problematic assumptions concerning what a productive intellectual discipline must be. In contrast to Kelsay's proposal to return to a neo‐Weberian sociology of religious norm elaboration and justification, we argue that CRE is and should be practiced as a field of study in active collaboration with other fields that consider human flourishing, employing a variety of methods borrowed from multiple disciplines.…”
This essay is a critical engagement with recent assessments of comparative religious ethics by John Kelsay and Jung Lee. Contra Kelsay's proposal to return to a neo‐Weberian sociology of religious norm elaboration and justification, the authors argue that comparative religious ethics is and should be practiced as a field of study in active conversation with other fields that consider human flourishing, employing a variety of methods that have their roots in multiple disciplines. Cross‐pollination from a variety of disciplines is a strength of comparative ethics, which has enlivened recent and ongoing research on ethics, not a problem to be resolved by convergence on a single, distinctively comparative project. The authors also argue in response to Lee and Kelsay that while individual comparative studies of virtue and personal formation can be flawed in various ways, this line of research has been productive and at times very compelling. Moreover, attention to comparative virtue ethics shows how scholarship on some ethical topics necessitates drawing on a variety of perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds, a conclusion relevant to all work in religious ethics today.
“…So long as this description holds, the contributions to knowledge made by scholars of comparative religious ethics will remain marginal, at least as compared with those of historians, philosophers, linguists, or people working in any of the natural sciences. (Kelsay , 583–84)Kelsay argues that scholars working in what has been called the “third wave” of CRE (Bucar ) have not made much headway in legitimizing and systematizing the comparative study of religious ethics as a discipline. Kelsay's claim of disciplinary deficiency is meant to be provocative, but its justification is unconvincing, trading on a number of suppressed premises.…”
Section: John Kelsay's Assessment Of the Present State Of Crementioning
confidence: 99%
“…So long as this description holds, the contributions to knowledge made by scholars of comparative religious ethics will remain marginal, at least as compared with those of historians, philosophers, linguists, or people working in any of the natural sciences. (Kelsay , 583–84)…”
Section: John Kelsay's Assessment Of the Present State Of Crementioning
confidence: 99%
“…Kelsay's narration of the lack of development of CRE in the last thirty‐five years trades on his appraisal that scholars in the field do not agree on what he alternatively describes as a classification scheme, taxonomy, typology, and universal structure (Kelsay , 583–84, 590, 593). However, it is far from clear (1) why fields of study should be understood in linear “progressive” terms (2012, 593), (2) why universal agreement on a theoretical framework is necessary for productive work in the first place, and (3) what sort of theoretical constructs or categories would be sufficient.…”
Section: John Kelsay's Assessment Of the Present State Of Crementioning
confidence: 99%
“…John Kelsay (2010b, ) and Jung Lee () have recently published review articles in the Journal of Religious Ethics arguing that comparative religious ethics (henceforth “CRE”) has gone astray in a variety of ways over the last few decades. Both refer to a “third wave” of CRE scholarship, which they respectively judge as having made little progress (Kelsay , 584) and having failed to live up to its theoretical aspirations (Lee , 556). Both also single out for criticism a line of comparative scholarship centered on virtue ethics and personal formation.…”
mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…We begin with Kelsay's () negative assessment of CRE as a whole, which we argue turns on problematic assumptions concerning what a productive intellectual discipline must be. In contrast to Kelsay's proposal to return to a neo‐Weberian sociology of religious norm elaboration and justification, we argue that CRE is and should be practiced as a field of study in active collaboration with other fields that consider human flourishing, employing a variety of methods borrowed from multiple disciplines.…”
This essay is a critical engagement with recent assessments of comparative religious ethics by John Kelsay and Jung Lee. Contra Kelsay's proposal to return to a neo‐Weberian sociology of religious norm elaboration and justification, the authors argue that comparative religious ethics is and should be practiced as a field of study in active conversation with other fields that consider human flourishing, employing a variety of methods that have their roots in multiple disciplines. Cross‐pollination from a variety of disciplines is a strength of comparative ethics, which has enlivened recent and ongoing research on ethics, not a problem to be resolved by convergence on a single, distinctively comparative project. The authors also argue in response to Lee and Kelsay that while individual comparative studies of virtue and personal formation can be flawed in various ways, this line of research has been productive and at times very compelling. Moreover, attention to comparative virtue ethics shows how scholarship on some ethical topics necessitates drawing on a variety of perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds, a conclusion relevant to all work in religious ethics today.
Ethnography is commonly defined as a description of a people's culture, values, and normative beliefs. Presumably, ethnography can inform us about culturally specific ethical beliefs and the nature of ethics. What that study reveals is the focus of this essay, which will provide an introduction to the contemporary literature on ethnography and ethics, first by giving a brief history of the topic, noting the disciplinary and theoretical reasons for its recent emergence, and then by examining how ethnography can inform ethical reflection on normative behavior and moral forms of life. The essay will conclude with a consideration of the potential tensions and contradictions in the application of ethnography to the study of ethics.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
