Religious Ethics

The need for a parallel study of the values held by different religious communities in the western world has never been stronger, and this book draws together authors respected in six significant traditions to explore the ethical foundations of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Judaism and Christianity. Each section introduces a different religion and sets the wider context within which more specific questions can be asked.

Inspired by the 1993 Parliament of the World's Religions, this volume for the first time brings the scholarly discipline of comparative religious ethics into constructive collaboration with the community of interreligious dialogue. The contributors draw from both communities of discourse in addressing questions of method & theory & global moral issues-such as human rights, distributive justice, politics of war, international business, the environment, & genocide-in a cross-cultural context.

Listening for God proceeds from the author's belief that, across a wide spectrum of outlooks, people are attracted to religion, yet wary of it.

Continuing in the tradition of his well-received Religious Reason, Ronald Green here offers a penetrating moral understanding of religious belief and practice. Human religiousness, he contends, principally arises from a universal "deep structure" of moral reasoning that comprises three essential elements: one guides impartial moral reasoning; a second affirms the reality of moral retribution; and a third provides escape from the penalties that justly accompany unavoidable human moral failure. Using this innovative approach, Green confronts a series of different religious traditions and issues, including African primal religions, classical Chinese religion, the "Divine Command" tradition in Judaism and Christianity, religious ritual, and the economic teachings of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. Drawing on contemporary rationalist ethical theory, Green provides a simple but effective model for understanding the complexity of religious life.

Renowned scholar Robert Adams explores the relation between religion and ethics through a comprehensive philosophical account of a theistically-based framework for ethics. Adams' framework begins with the good rather than the right, and with excellence rather than usefulness. He argues that loving the excellent, of which adoring God is a clear example, is the most fundamental aspect of a life well lived. Developing his original and detailed theory, Adams contends that devotion, the sacred, grace, martyrdom, worship, vocation, faith, and other concepts drawn from religious ethics have been sorely overlooked in moral philosophy and can enrich the texture of ethical thought.

This study rethinks the ancient tradition of the common good to addressing contemporary urban and global social divisions. David Hollenbach draws on social analysis, moral philosophy, and theological ethics to chart new directions in urban life and global society. He argues that the division between the middle class and the poor in major cities and the challenges of globalization require a new commitment to the common good. Accordingly, believers and non-believers must move towards new forms of solidarity.

Separated from its anchorage in religion, ethics has followed the social sciences in seeing human beings as fundamentally characterized by self-interest, so that altruism is either naively idealistic or arrogantly self-sufficient. Colin Grant contends that, as a modern secular concept, altruism is a parody on the self-giving love of Christianity, so that its dismissal represents a social leveling that loses the depths that theology makes intelligible and religion makes possible. He argues that to dispense with altruism is to dispense with God and with the divine transformation of human possibilities.

In a provocative reexaminatin of the ethics of family, community, and sex, the author contends that the Christian right's campaign against homosexuality has come to limit the agenda for American Christianity as a whole. "We should be asking not whether gay people should be allowed to fit in, but rather which historically gay practices can help transform the schismatic, failing church today".