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Religion, Race, and the Limit of Ethics: Historical Considerations Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2024-08-19 Sarah Dees
This article examines the study of Indigenous religions and ethics in the late‐nineteenth and early‐twentieth centuries. Over the past few decades, scholars have grappled with the colonial origins of religious studies. This essay focuses on the history of anthropological scholarship on Indigenous religions and the significance of this work for the growth of the academic study of religious and ethical
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Animism, Eco‐Immanence, and Divine Transcendence: Toward an Integrated Religious Framework for Environmental Ethics Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2024-07-10 James W. Haring
It is intuitive to think that divine transcendence is incompatible with the sacredness of nature, especially when transcendence is combined with the idea that God alone is valuable. Divine transcendence seems to demote this‐worldly values in favor of union with God in a disembodied afterlife. Divine transcendence also seems to legitimize hierarchies, including male–female and human‐nature hierarchies
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Introduction to Focus Isssue: Kierkegaard, Religious Ethics, and Media Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2024-05-31 John P. Haman
The papers in this issue were first assembled for the American Academy of Religion conference in 2022 to consider Søren Kierkegaard's analysis of the media environment of his day and the relevance of his perspective to both traditional and new media today. Each author takes a different approach to Kierkegaard's ethics of mass communication, but all agree that his ideas still retain a great deal of
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Kierkegaard, Lippmann, and the Phantom Public in a Digital Age Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2024-05-27 John P. Haman
Søren Kierkegaard and Walter Lippmann wrote in very different times and places but both characterized the public as a “phantom.” Importantly, each did so within the context of a broader analysis that linked the press with specific notions about the public and democracy. This paper highlights the specific characteristics of the press that each thinker believed were responsible for the construction of
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Authorship and Accountability: Kierkegaard and Anonymity in the Press Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2024-05-21 Joseph Westfall
Søren Kierkegaard was engaged with the press in a variety of ways throughout his authorship. Although studies of Kierkegaard's interactions with the public press of his time have largely focused on his dispute with the satirical newspaper, Corsaren, in this paper I examine his first engagement with the press—a mostly anonymous newspaper dispute with the Danish social activist, Orla Lehmann, about the
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Responsibility in the Anthropocene: Paul Ricoeur and the Summons to Responsibility amid Global Environmental Degradation Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2024-04-17 Michael Le Chevallier
The nomenclature of the Anthropocene for this geological epoch marks in a novel way the global impact of human activity on the world. Consequently, it creatively raises the alarm bell of global environmental devastation. However, the narrative implicit in the Anthropocene presents challenges to use it as a departure point for developing an ethics of responsibility, as it contains morally relevant but
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Dispositions, Virtues, and Indian Ethics Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2024-04-12 Andrea Raimondi, Ruchika Jain
According to Arti Dhand, it can be argued that all Indian ethics have been primarily virtue ethics. Many have indeed jumped on the virtue bandwagon, providing prima facie interpretations of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist canons in virtue terms. Others have expressed firm skepticism, claiming that virtues are not proven to be grounded in the nature of things and that, ultimately, the appeal to virtue might
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Moral Exemplarity: The Trouble with Linda Zagzebski's Semantic Theory of Exemplarity Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2024-03-28 Emily Dumler-Winckler
The emotion of admiration and the semantic theory of natural kinds and direct reference are foundational for Linda Zagzebski's exemplarist moral theory and divine motivation theory. Many have examined difficulties that arise from the central role of admiration, while others have engaged her account of the incarnation. Little attention has been given to her semantic theory or philosophy of language
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“You Will Not Surely Die”: The Pentecostal Aesthetics and Ethics of Serpent Handling Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2024-02-27 Michael Austin Kamenicky
This paper is an aesthetic analysis of the practice of serpent handling by Christians in the Appalachian region of the United States. The purpose of this analysis is to understand serpent handling's aesthetic relationship to the Pentecostal tradition and exposit the implications of this relationship for the practice's legal status. The first section examines the history and defining characteristics
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Lot's Daughters and Naomi and Ruth: Of “Moral Love” and National Myths Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2024-01-24 John E. Carter
This essay argues that the book of Ruth's reopening of Israel's history and national mythology functions in such a way as to redeem, as it were, the plight of the subaltern Moabite—a plight begun with the daughters of Lot in Genesis 19. A parallel is then drawn with the 1619 Project, the recent journalistic project which posits the entire historical sweep of African slavery in North America since 1619
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In Honor and Memory of Sumner B. Twiss Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2024-01-22 Diana Fritz Cates, Irene Oh, Bruce Grelle, Simeon O. Ilesanmi, John Kelsay, Paul Lauritzen, David Little, Ping-Cheung “PC” Lo, Kate E. Temoney
Sumner B. (Barney) Twiss, who died in 2023, was for ten years a General Editor of the Journal of Religious Ethics (JRE). He was a frequent contributor of articles, a member of the JRE Editorial Board, and a member of the journal's Board of Trustees. In this article, colleagues and students reflect on some of his many contributions, not only to the JRE but to the broader discursive fields of comparative
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Why Gaps Matter—A Negative Hermeneutical Approach to the Reconciliation Process in the Diocese of British Columbia Based on the Example of Bishop Logan's “Sacred Journey” Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2024-01-22 Edda Wolff
This essay delves into the utilization of a negative hermeneutical approach, focusing on gaps, tensions, and the absence of elements, to enrich our comprehension of reconciliation efforts. It posits that this method aids in discerning more and less appropriate approaches to reconciliation processes. Negative hermeneutics serves as both a technique and an ongoing journey of exploration, self-assessment
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Peter Abelard is not a Proto-Kantian Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Lily M. Abadal
Though there has been much debate about whether Abelard's ethics are dangerously subjective or surprisingly absolutist, one thing is unanimous: they are intentionalist. The goal of this article is to parse out what should be meant by this claim, distancing his ethical account from the popular Kantian appraisal. Though much of the secondary literature on Abelard likens him to Kant, I argue that this
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The Precarious Spaces Between Us: The Exchange of Food and Merit in Thailand's Affective Moral Economy during the COVID-19 Pandemic Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Julia Cassaniti
In the middle of 2020, Buddhism in Thailand looked quite different than it had just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Monasteries had closed their doors to the public, and monastic ordinations ceased. The institution of Thai Buddhism stayed relevant, however, largely by promoting a quite unusual practice. In addition to the typical religious activity of lay followers offering food to monks, and receiving
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Finitude, Necessity, and Healing from Despair in Kierkegaard's The Lily and the Bird Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-12-07 Anna Louise Strelis Söderquist
This study underscores The Lily and the Bird's response to despair in The Sickness unto Death. By suggesting in The Lily and the Bird that we look to nature's creatures to learn an attunement and responsiveness to our situation as physical creatures subject to finite constraints, Kierkegaard's text comes into dialogue with a form of misalignment portrayed in The Sickness unto Death as a refusal of
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Climate Apartheid, Race, and the Future of Solidarity: Three Frameworks of Response (Anthropocene, Mestizaje, Cimarronaje) Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-12-06 Matthew Elia
In our emerging climate future, devastation will not land evenly. “Climate apartheid” names a world where the rich insulate themselves from its most catastrophic effects, while the global poor stand increasingly subject to rising seas, failing crops, intensifying weather events (floods, hurricanes, wildfires) and thus to the necessity of movement: some project a billion climate refugees by 2050. Yet
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Religious Ethics and the Human Dignity Revolution Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-11-14 Simeon O. Ilesanmi
Human dignity, even when analyzed through the lens of human rights, has received surprisingly little attention in the Journal of Religious Ethics, in contrast to a resurgent global interest in it. This article examines some possible reasons for this diminutive interest and makes a case for dignity's integration into the mainstream of religious ethics scholarship. A social conception of human dignity
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Feeling Companionship: Hansen's Disease and Moral Authority in Japanese Shin Buddhism Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-11-14 Jessica Starling
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork among Japanese Shin Buddhists who have an enduring commitment to volunteering with Hansen's disease patients in Japan and its former colonies. I trace the negotiation of emotions in this Jōdo Shinshū ethical context, identifying the Buddhist, Japanese, and global liberal vocabularies that ascribe moral value to various emotional responses to suffering and
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Ethics after Humanity Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-10-30 Willis Jenkins
Can humanity survive climate change and mass extinction? Concepts of humanity assumed or implicit in the field at the founding of this journal are under critical pressure from multiple directions. Reading across schools of thought confronting relations sometimes called Anthropocene, this essay explains five tasks for religious ethics “after humanity:” (i) incorporate species-level relations of power
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Whether and How We Will Continue to Reproduce Ourselves Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-10-25 Grace Y. Kao
The author examines two open questions for religious ethicists: whether continuing to have children is a bad idea, given the challenges of antinatalism and climate change, and how we should evaluate the future of reproductive technology. Kao responds to these questions without resolving them by drawing upon human rights, the reproductive justice framework, and principles of social justice.
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An Uncouth Monk: The Moral Aesthetics of Buddhist Para-Charisma Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-10-20 Sara Ann Swenson
In this article, I propose a new theory of “Buddhist para-charisma” by analyzing the case of an iconoclastic monk in Vietnam. My argument draws from 20 months of ethnographic research conducted in Ho Chi Minh City between 2015 and 2019. During fieldwork, I was introduced to a highly respected monk with the extraordinary capacity to read minds and perceive karmic obstacles in the lives of his lay and
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Response to Focus Issue: Buddhist Moral Emotions Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-10-13 Maria Heim
Heim responds to the five articles by anthropologists concerned with contemporary Buddhist practices and ideologies of emotions, arguing that a history of emotions approach that attends to the centrality of emotions and their evaluations can be important for ethics. She submits that while sometimes studies of moral psychology in Buddhist ethics have focused on individuals, these articles suggest how
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Introduction to the Special Issue on Buddhist Moral Emotions Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-10-13 Jessica Starling, Sara Ann Swenson
This introduction to the special issue on “Buddhist Moral Emotions” explains the need for analyzing affect and emotion for a full understanding of Buddhist ethics. The introduction surveys major works in the turn to affect and advocates for ethnographic research on Buddhism as a lived religion in order to address the role of emotion in Buddhist ethics.
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Ethics After Comparative Religious Ethics: Rereading Little and Twiss in a Pragmatic Light Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-10-12 Jung H. Lee
This paper presents a rereading of David Little and Sumner Twiss's Comparative Religious Ethics in the context of its initial reception and legacy within the field of religious ethics and argues that we can read it more charitably as a piece of pragmatism rather than as a work of formalism or semi-formalism. If one does not read Little and Twiss as committed positivists concerned with realizing a specific
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Conscientious Objection in Healthcare: The Requirement of Justification, the Moral Threshold, and Military Refusals Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-10-04 Tomasz Żuradzki
A dogma accepted in many ethical, religious, and legal frameworks is that the reasons behind conscientious objection (CO) in healthcare cannot be evaluated or judged by any institution because conscience is individual and autonomous. This paper shows that this background view is mistaken: the requirement to reveal and explain the reasons for conscientious objection in healthcare is ethically justified
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The Logic of Kingian Nonviolence: A Synthetic Reading of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Political Thought Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-09-07 Nicholas Buck
Approaching Martin Luther King Jr. as a constructive political theorist, I present a synthetic view of his thought that is able to make cogent and compelling sense of prominent concepts and lines of reasoning in his writings. I contend that King's political thought, which is grounded in his moral, metaphysical, and theological convictions, is best understood as structurally teleological and oriented
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Ethical Reasoning in a Morally Diverse World: Higher Education and the Purposes of Religious Ethics Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Darlene Fozard Weaver
As the Journal of Religious Ethics celebrates its 50th anniversary, higher education in the United States is in a period of upheaval. How does its changing landscape impact the ways we articulate the value of religious ethics? What do our students need from ethics coursework? Both the upheaval in higher education and recent critiques of higher education from religious ethicists highlight questions
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Religious Ethics and its Publics Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-08-06 Aaron Stalnaker
Past discussions of the public role of religious ethics scholarship have tended to focus on the propriety of religious argumentation in the public square. Rather than critiquing or vindicating such public engagement by explicitly religious thinkers, this essay recommends broader public engagement by scholars of comparatively oriented religious ethics, exploring why this goal is worthwhile, some possible
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Religious Ethics as a Social Practice Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-07-31 Alda Balthrop-Lewis
The Journal of Religious Ethics (JRE) was established at a particular moment in the United States in the early 1970s. This article investigates how that moment—in the institutional milieu of academic theology and religious studies in which the (JRE) emerged—influenced its founding. It does this through attention to three main sources: (1) the original charter and bylaws of the JRE, (2) publications
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On Transdisciplinary Possibility: An Interstitial Exploration of American Religious History and Religious Ethics Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-07-25 Laura A. Simpson
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
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“Someone is Wrong About Sex on the Internet”: Online Discourse and the Role of Public Scholarship on Jewish Sexual Ethics Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-07-21 Rebecca J. Epstein-Levi
Regnant public accounts of Jewish sexual ethics—both external and internal—fall short of what they could accomplish. Using a Twitter thread on sexual ethics which falls into some key errors as a case study, I argue that Jewish ethicists are poised to address the thread's errors by offering sources for alternative moral frameworks. I examine how thinking with this Twitter thread can help us clarify
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Tainted Legacies and the Journal of Religious Ethics Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-06-20 Karen V. Guth
This essay reflects on the role academic journals like the JRE can play in facilitating and addressing tainted legacies. As an institution in religious ethics, the journal not only determines whose work is important, but it also replicates such judgments, passing certain sets of issues, concerns, and methods down from the past to the present, shaping future work. Journals highlight the systemic, structural
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Religious Ethics and Public Policy: On Doing Public Bioethics Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-06-19 James F. Childress
In response to the Journal of Religious Ethics (JRE) editors' request for reflections on “how religious ethicists have interacted with, and ought to interact with, public policy decision makers,” this essay focuses on doing religious ethics in the context of doing public bioethics, especially through participating in public bioethics bodies (PBBs) established to provide advice to public policymakers
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The Coherence of Buddhism: Relativism, Ethics, and Psychology Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-06-15 Jonathan C. Gold
This essay defends a Buddhist answer to the question of how a skeptical tradition might account for its moral position. Two domains in Buddhist thought and practice are often considered to be dissimilar, perhaps contradictory. On the one hand, there is an aspiration to nirvana and a philosophy that describes everything as “emptiness” and rejects, with apparent universality, “attachment to views.” On
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Clawing Through Bits of Glass and Bricks: James Baldwin and Reinhold Niebuhr on the Birmingham Church Bombing Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-06-09 Jamall A. Calloway
This article analyzes the unpublished dialogue between James Baldwin and Reinhold Niebuhr where they discussed the role of the Christian church in the wake of six child murders in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963. On that catastrophic day—one that is impossible to forget—the Ku Klux Klan bombed The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and two black boys were subsequently shot and killed. In the
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Teaching Religion and Upholding Academic Freedom Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-05-18 Betsy Barre, Mark Berkson, Diana Fritz Cates, Stewart Clem, Simeon O. Ilesanmi, Thomas A. Lewis, Charles Mathewes, James McCarty, Irene Oh, Atalia Omer, Laurie L. Patton, Kayla Renee Wheeler
The editors of the JRE collected short essays from scholars of religion in response to a recent incident at Hamline University that made national headlines. Last fall, Hamline University administrators refused to extend a contract to an adjunct professor of art history after a Muslim student accused her of Islamophobia for showing a 14th-century image of Mohammad in an online class. The event provoked
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Fearful and Faint-Hearted: On Affect and the Just-War Tradition Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-05-17 Martin Kavka
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
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In the Shadow of Hourani: Thinking Islamic Ethics in the 21st Century Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-05-17 Raissa A. von Doetinchem de Rande
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
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The Problem of Inclusion: Feminist Critique in Religious Ethics Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-05-06 Fannie Bialek
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
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Translating Buen Vivir: Latin American Indigenous Cultures, Stadial Development, and Comparative Religious Ethics Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-05-02 David Lantigua
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
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Jesus and Dogs: Or How to Command a Friend? Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-03-31 John R. Bowlin
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
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Reflecting and Advancing the Transformation: Catholic Theological Ethics and the Journal of Religious Ethics, 1973–2023 Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-03-31 Linda Hogan
This essay considers how the JRE has engaged Catholic ethics in the last 50 years and how the concerns of Catholic ethics during this period of exceptional change are reflected and developed in the JRE. It discusses the transformation of Catholic ethics by focusing on the transitions: (i) from classical to historical consciousness; (ii) from an essentialist concept of human nature to a dynamic concept
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Organizing Muslim Virtue: Community Organizing, Comparative Religious Ethics, and the South African Muslim Struggle Against Apartheid Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-03-23 Sam Houston
While offering valuable comparative insights into models of the self and ethical formation across religious traditions, studies of virtue ethics have been critiqued for putting forward accounts which are elite-focused. Some comparative ethicists have pointed to work in religious ethics and political theology on faith-based community organizing as offering compelling case studies of non-elite ethical
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The Ethics and Politics of Religious Ethics, 1973–2023 Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-03-14 Richard B. Miller
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
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Religious Ethics and the Spirit of Undomesticated Dissent Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-03-02 Keri Day
The field of religious ethics contributes to practices of resistance and hope in broader society. In advancing my claim that religious ethics contributes to practices of resistance and hope today, I first tell a story about the changing demographics in the field of religious ethics and why this demographic shift is important. I next focus on womanist religious scholarship as an exemplary discourse
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How the Anthropocene Changes Religious Ethics Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-02-25 Larry Rasmussen
Humans are remaking the planet, with the planetary human imprint so profound that all planetary systems are being changed: the atmosphere, the hydrosphere and cryosphere (water and ice), the lithosphere (Earth's crust), and the biosphere (the community of life). The changes are so deep and far reaching that a new geological epoch, the first effected by humans, has set in, the Anthropocene. It succeeds
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Anthropocene in Context: A Response to Rasmussen Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-02-09 Laura M. Hartman
In response to Larry Rasmussen's article about religious ethics in the Anthropocene, I offer an analysis that both contextualizes and elaborates upon his ideas. I introduce other humanities disciplines that have already wrestled with this question, and scholars of color whose voices offer needed correctives to the colonial heritage of most academic disciplines. I explore topics including human agency
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Muslim Ethics and the Ethnographic Imagination Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-02-06 Kirsten Wesselhoeft
Theoretical and methodological discussions of ethnography and ethics have appeared regularly in the Journal of Religious Ethics for at least the past 13 years. Many of these conversations have been preoccupied by the relationship between “normative” work in religious ethics and “descriptive” work on moral worlds and patterns of reasoning. However, there has often been a perceived impasse when it comes
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Christian Ethics, Religious Ethics, and Secular Ethics: A Contemporary Reappraisal Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-02-02 Stewart Clem
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
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Revisiting Religious Ethics as Field and Discipline Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-01-30 Jennifer A. Herdt
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
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Praying Truthfully: Sincerity and the Inducing of Belief Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2023-01-12 Michael Haruni
In a Jewish context, it seems, it is a naïve consensus view that in praying liturgically one aims to express to God, in the manner of ordinary, interpersonal conversation, those thoughts stated by the text. But on this ordinary conversation model (OCM), a problem of insincerity arises when, as commonly happens, the text states a claim the practitioner does not believe. The idea of redeeming one's prayer
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Moral agency in the reproductive marketplace: Social Egg Freezing in the united states Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2022-12-15 Emma McDonald
More and more women are turning to egg freezing as a strategy for managing conflicting timelines related to professional goals and family formation aspirations. Drawing on critical realism, this article argues that vicious aspects of the reproductive marketplace and the workplace along with cultural ideals of motherhood and the nuclear family incentivize agents to freeze their eggs. While individual
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The Political vs. the Theological: The Scope of Secularity in Arendtian Forgiveness Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2022-12-12 Shinkyu Lee
The conventional interpretation of Hannah Arendt's accounts of forgiveness considers them secularistic. The secular features of her thinking that resist grounding the act of forgiving in divine criteria offer a good corrective to religious forgiveness that fosters depoliticization. Arendt's vision of free politics, however, calls for much more nuance and complexity regarding the secular and the religious
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Caste and Devotion: A Casteless Framework for (Some) Forms of Hindu Devotionalism Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2022-12-09 Akshay Gupta
The caste system has caused widespread oppression within Hinduism. In this paper, I analyze the Bhagavad Gītā (c. 500 BCE–200 CE) and the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (c. 9th century CE), two highly influential Hindu sacred texts, to understand how they conceptualize the relationship between caste and devotion (bhakti). I argue that there is a societal framework that does not maintain the caste system but which
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Idolatry and Time: Capitalism and Money in Twenty-First-Century Christian Economic Theology Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2022-11-29 Samuel Hayim Brody
Christian economic theology is distinguished from Christian social ethics by its methodological reflection on the emergence, formation, and proper boundaries of the economic sphere, as well as transcendental reflection on the conditions of possibility of economic science. In practice, this often amounts to anxiety about the authority of Christianity in the economic sphere, as well as about the extent
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Ideal and Mandatory Moral Norms Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2022-11-27 Thomas Finegan
“Ideals” are often invoked in contemporary theological discussion of moral norms, especially but not exclusively regarding norms of marriage/sex ethics. Seemingly absent from the discussion, however, is focused critical analysis of the distinction between ideal and mandatory normativity. Attempting to address this oversight, the following paper begins by highlighting a serious inconsistency between
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Managing New Technology When Effective Control is Lost: Facing Hard Choices With CRISPR Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2022-11-05 Joel Andrew Zimbelman
This paper seeks to expand our appreciation of the gene editing tool, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats-associated protein 9 (CRISPR-Cas9), its function, its benefits and risks, and the challenges of regulating its use. I frame CRISPR's emergence and its current use in the context of 150 years of formal exploration of heredity and genetics. I describe CRISPR's structure and
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Genome Editing and Relational Autonomy Journal of Religious Ethics (IF 0.5) Pub Date : 2022-11-03 Aline Kalbian
Developed in the past two decades, the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats-associated protein 9 (CRISPR-Cas9) technique offers greater accessibility and efficiency in editing genes. Its immediate success has transformed medical research and treatment in productive ways, but has also left questions about ethical consequences in its wake. These are questions familiar to bioethical