Comparative Religious Ethics E-Book

Darrell J. Fasching

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 976

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

This popular textbook has been thoroughly revised and updated to reflect recent global developments, whilst retaining its unique and compelling narrative-style approach. Using ancient stories from diverse religions, it explores a broad range of important and complex moral issues, resulting in a truly reader-friendly and comparative introduction to religious ethics. * A thoroughly revised and expanded new edition of this popular textbook, yet retains the unique narrative-style approach which has proved so successful with students * Considers the ways in which ancient stories from diverse religions, such as the Bhagavad Gita and the lives of Jesus and Buddha, have provided ethical orientation in the modern world * Updated to reflect recent discussions on globalization and its influence on cross-cultural and comparative ethics, economic dimensions to ethics, Gandhian traditions, and global ethics in an age of terrorism * Expands coverage of Asian religions, quest narratives, the religious and philosophical approach to ethics in the West, and considers Chinese influences on Thich Nhat Hanh's Zen Buddhism, and Augustine's Confessions * Accompanied by an instructor's manual (coming soon, see href="http://www.wiley.com/go/fasching">www.wiley.com/go/fasching) which shows how to use the book in conjunction with contemporary films

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part I: Religion, Ethics, and Stories of War and Peace

Chapter 1: Religion, Ethics, and Storytelling

Storytelling: from Comparative Ethics to Global Ethics

Religion: the Sacred and the Holy

The Deep Structures of the Sacred and the Holy and Their Mediations

The Awakening of Ethical Consciousness: the Power of Religious Stories, East and West

The Great Religious Stories of the World – an Overview

A Postscript on Religious Language

Sources

Chapter 2: Stories of War and Peace in an Age of Globalization

Overview

Tales of Madness: from Auschwitz to Hiroshima

Auschwitz and Hiroshima: the Formative Religious Events of the Postmodern World

Techno-Bureaucratic Rationality and the Demise of Ethical Consciousness

Doubling and the Myth of Life through Death: the Spiritual Logic of Mass Death in the Twentieth Century

The Way of All the Earth: Global Ethics and Tales of Divine Madness

Sources

Part II: War and Peace: Ancient Stories and Postmodern Life Stories

Introduction: Ethics after Auschwitz and Hiroshima

Sources

Chapter 3: Gilgamesh and the Religious Quest

Overview

The Story of Gilgamesh

Urbanization, Doubling, Death, and the Possibility of Ethical Reflection

The Quest – the Way of the Virtues

Sources

Chapter 4: The Socratic Religious Experience: from the Birth of Ethics to the Quest for Cosmopolis

Overview

The Story of the Trial of Socrates

The Socratic Invention of Ethics – the Way of Doubt

The Polis and the Quest for Cosmopolis: the Classical Era

The Story of Augustine's Confessions – Faith as a Surrender to Doubt

The Augustinian-Kantian Quest for a Global Ethic

Sources

Chapter 5: Hindu Stories – Ancient and Postmodern

Cosmic Story: the Myth of Liberation

Formative Story: Arjuna and Krishna

Life Story: Mohandas K. Gandhi and the Way of Brahmacharya

Comparative Reflections: the Paradoxes of War and Peace

Sources

Chapter 6: Buddhist Stories – Ancient and Postmodern

Formative Story: Siddhartha

The Cosmic Story Revised: the Myth of Liberation

Life Story: Thich Nhat Hanh, the Way of Mindfulness and the Dao of Zen

Comparative Reflections: Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh

Postcript: the Virtues of the Quest in Gilgamesh, Augustine, and Siddhartha

Sources

Chapter 7: Jewish Stories – Ancient and Postmodern

Cosmic Story: the Myth of History

Formative Story: the Audacity of Job

Life Story: Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Way of Audacity

Comparative Reflections: Heschel, Gandhi, and Thich Nhat Hanh

Sources

Chapter 8: Christian Stories – Ancient and Postmodern

Formative Story: Jesus of Nazareth

The Cosmic Story Revised: the Incarnation of the Word

Life Story: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Way of the Cross

Comparative Reflections: King, Heschel, Gandhi, and Thich Nhat Hanh

Sources

Chapter 9: Islamic Stories – Ancient and Postmodern

Formative Story: Muhammad

Cosmic Story: further Revisions of the Myth of History

Life Story: Malcolm X and the Way of Pilgrimage

Comparative Reflections: Just War or Non-Violence? – Malcolm X's Argument with the Gandhian Tradition

Sources

Part III: The Path to Global Ethics – the Way of All the Earth

Introduction

Chapter 10: Feminist Audacity and the Ethics of Interdependence

The Feminist Challenge to the Myths of Life through Death

The Feminist Alternative: Interdependence and the Ethics of Care

Life Story: Joanna Macy and Buddhist Ecofeminism

Life Story: Rosemary Ruether and Christian Ecofeminism

Conclusion

Sources

Chapter 11: Cosmopolis: the Way of All the Earth

Globalization and the Story of Babel: from Ethnocentrism to Interdependence

Ecofeminism: from the Social Ecology of Conscience to the Social Ecology of Justice

The Way of All the Earth

Sources

Index of Names and Terms

Index of Subjects

This edition first published 2011

© 2011 Darrell J. Fasching, Dell deChant and David M. Lantigua

Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (1e, 2001)

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell's publishing program has been merged with Wiley's global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fasching, Darrell J., 1944-

Comparative religious ethics : a narrative approach to global ethics / Darrell J. Fasching, Dell deChant, David M. Lantigua. – 2nd ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4443-3133-2 (pbk.)

1. Religious ethics—Comparative studies. I. deChant, Dell. II. Lantigua, David M. III. Title.

BJ1188.F35 2011

205–dc22

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs [ISBN 9781444396119]; ePub [ISBN 9781444396126]

For John S. Dunne,

for the Monks of Mount Saviour Monastery,

and in Memory of John H. McCombe

Preface

In 1972 I was a graduate student in the doctoral program at Syracuse University, accustomed to spending a week or two at Mount Saviour Monastery in Elmira New York during the summer. From my first encounter with these Benedictine monks they taught me the profound meaning of “hospitality.” It was there, under the spiritual guidance of Father Alexander, that I was first introduced to zazen – Buddhist meditation as a form of spiritual practice a Christian might profitably engage in.

The monastic custom is to have spiritual reading done aloud by one of the monks while the rest take their meals. During my visit that summer the spiritual reading was from a newly published book, The Way of All the Earth, by John S. Dunne of Notre Dame University. I was stunned, overwhelmed, and entranced by this book and immediately went out and bought a copy upon returning to Syracuse. Its thesis, that a new way of being religious was emerging in an age of globalization, one that he described as “passing over” and “coming back,” became for me the organizing insight of my own life's work, including this volume. So I gratefully dedicate this book to John S. Dunne and the monks of Mount Saviour. Without their influence it would never have been written. It is also dedicated to the memory of the man I worked for and with at that time, Dr. John H. McCombe, then Dean of Hendricks Chapel at Syracuse University. He is for me a model of the very practice of “passing over” that Dunne advocates.

It is hard for me to believe the first edition of Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach was published a full decade ago in 2001. Despite being a textbook, this book really functions as the third part of a four volume series on religion and global ethics that I undertook. The first volume, Narrative Theology after Auschwitz: From Alienation to Ethics, appeared almost two decades ago (in 1992) and was followed by The Ethical Challenge of Auschwitz and Hiroshima a year later. The core themes of those two volumes are presented in the second chapter of Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach. This book extends the argument of the 1993 book that global public policy ethics requires a critique of the narrative imagination. Comparative Religious Ethics shows how this type of critique emerged in the last half of the 20th century in the global dialogue between figures like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thich Nhat Hanh, and the others presented in this book. Along the way, in The Coming of the Millennium (1996), I explored how a Christian ethic of hospitality to the stranger participates in this global dialogue and global experiment.

This second edition of Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach to Global Ethics seeks to fill in some of the missing elements of the first edition, especially the inclusion of a chapter on philosophical ethics from Socrates to Kant's ethic of global hospitality; the inclusion of a section on Chinese religions (Daoism and Confucianism) and their influence on Thich Nhat Hanh's Zen Buddhism in Chapter 6, and an expanded treatment of global ethics and the inclusion of a model of “The Social Ecology of Justice” to complement the “Social Ecology of Conscience” in the final chapter.

I am especially pleased to have shared the authorship tasks of Comparative Religious Ethics with two of my former students, Dell deChant and David Lantigua. Both studied with me at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Dell co-authored the first edition with me and now David has joined us for this second edition. Dell is now Associate Chair of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa and an accomplished author in his own right; David is a doctoral candidate at Notre Dame whom I can guarantee will soon be making significant contributions as an author. They have made this a multigenerational project that we all hope will reach a multigenerational readership.

Darrell J. FaschingUniversity of South Florida, Tampa

Acknowledgments

The authors and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reproduce copyright material.

The New Jerusalem Bible, excerpt, copyright © 1985 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd., and Doubleday, a division of Random House Inc. Reprinted by permission.

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, Catholic Edition, copyright 1989 and 1993 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA. Use by permission. All rights reserved.

Thich Nhat Hanh, reprinted from Call Me By My True Names: The Collected Poems of Thich Nhat Hanh, with permission of Parallax Press, Berkeley, California.

Malcolm X, “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, from The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, copyright © 1965 by Alex Haley and Betty Shabazz. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

John Henrik Clarke (ed.) Malcolm X: The Man and His Times (Collier Books, New York, 1969).

Photograph of Mahatma Gandhi: © Bettmann/CORBIS.

Photograph of Thich Nhat Hanh: Nang Sao.

Photograph of Abraham Joshua Heschel: © The Lotte Jacobi Collection, University of New Hampshire.

Photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr. 1964: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, U.S. News & World Report Magazine Collection, [LC-DIG-ppmsc-01269].

Photograph of Malcolm X: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, U.S. News & World Report Magazine Collection, [LC-DIG-ppmsc-01274].

Photograph of Joanna Macy: Hanna Morjan.

Photograph of Rosemary Radford Ruether: Annie Wells.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Part I

Religion, Ethics, and Stories of War and Peace

Chapter 1

Religion, Ethics, and Storytelling

Human religiousness is defined by two opposing deep structures of human experience and imagination that shape the way stories are told, heard and interpreted. Moreover, our understanding of good and evil is defined by the kind of story we think we are in and the role we see ourselves playing in that story. The terms “sacred” and “holy,” which have typically been used interchangeably, are proposed here as names for these opposing deep structures. The sacred defines the experience of those who share a common identity as “human” and see all others as profane and less (or less than) human. The sacred generates a morality expressed in narratives of mistrust and hostility toward the stranger. The experience of the holy, by contrast, generates an ethic which calls into question every sacred morality in order to transform it in the name of justice and compassion. An ethical story is one that questions sacred morality in the name of hospitality to the stranger and audacity on behalf of the stranger. The task of an ethic of the holy is not to replace the sacred morality of a society but to transform it by breaking down the divisions between the sacred and profane through narratives of hospitality to the stranger which affirm the human dignity of precisely those who do not share “my identity” and “my story.”

Storytelling: from Comparative Ethics to Global Ethics

In April of 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., often referred to as “the American Gandhi,” went to Memphis to help black workers settle a garbage strike. At the time, this Baptist minister from the black church tradition was looking forward to spending the approaching Passover with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Heschel, who had marched with him in a civil rights protest at Selma, Alabama, three years earlier, had become a close friend and supporter. Unfortunately, King was not able to keep that engagement. Like Gandhi before him, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., a man of non-violence, was violently assassinated. Another of King's friends, the Buddhist monk and anti-Vietnam war activist, Thich Nhat Hanh, whom King had nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, received the news of his death while at an interreligious conference in New York City. Only the previous spring, King had officially come out against the Vietnam War, partly at the urging of Thich Nhat Hanh and Abraham Joshua Heschel. This occurred under the auspices of Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam, founded by Heschel, John Bennett, and Richard Neuhaus. Now, he who had called for an end to hatred, violence and war was dead. But the spiritual and ethical vision he shared with his friends, across religions and cultures, is not. It is alive and well.

Our task in this book is to understand how a Christian minister, a Jewish rabbi, and a Buddhist monk, all inspired by a Hindu “Mahatma” (Great Soul), Mohandas K. Gandhi, were able to share a common ethical vision of non-violence while maintaining their respective religious identities. We shall do so while taking into account important questions concerning this ethic raised by the Muslim Malcolm X and the feminist voices of Rosemary Ruether (Christian) and Joanna Macy (Buddhist). Out of the dialogue among them we believe an important spiritual and ethical path for a global ethic is emerging. It is what John Dunne calls “the way of all the earth” – a biblical phrase that could also be translated “the way of all flesh” or the way of all mortal beings.

We live in a developing global civilization made up of many religions and cultures interconnected by mass media, international transportation, international corporations, and the internet. No longer can any person, country, or religion be an island: we are more and more interdependent. The twentieth century began with great hopes that science and technology would usher in a secular age of rationality, peace, and progress. Instead, it ushered in an age of apocalyptic nightmares – an age of nationalism, racism and global conflict leading to two world wars and an estimated 100 000 000 deaths. Science and technology, it seems, were better at creating instruments of mass destruction, like the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, than the instruments of peace. The question that hangs over our heads is whether the next century (indeed the next millennium) will bring more of the same, or whether diverse religions and cultures will find ways to build bridges to an era of peace. It remains an open question whether the religions of the world will be part of the problem or part of the solution.

In addressing this question we are, moreover, faced with the serious challenge of cultural and ethical relativism. Are religions and cultures so different from one another that all their interactions inevitably result in conflict and misunderstanding? Are they so different from each other that no ethical consensus can be reached? The study of ethics must be more than an “objective” survey of abstract theories taught in a noncommittal fashion. It ought to convey the wisdom one generation has to pass on to the next. To leave the next generation with no wisdom in an age as dangerous as ours is to create a cynical generation that believes there are no standards and so one view of life is thought to be as good as another. The wisdom that has come to birth in our time, we are convinced, is that which has emerged in response to the atrocities of World War II, the indignities of racism, sexism and colonialism everywhere, and the violation of our environment by modern scientific/technological civilization. What the dangers of our time call for is an interreligious and international strategy for turning around our science and technology, protecting the human dignity of all peoples, and restoring the ecology of our mother earth. The study of comparative religious ethics has an important role to play in addressing these issues through forging a global ethic.

The answers we seek, however, lie not so much in theories as in the life stories of extraordinary persons who have wrestled with questions of justice, non-violence, and ecological well-being in an age of racism, sexism, religious prejudice, nationalism, colonialism, terrorism, and nuclear war. Our story picks out a thread of cross-cultural or global conversation from the human drama of history that begins with the Russian novelist Tolstoy (1828–1910) who in turn influenced Gandhi (1869–1948) who in turn influenced a generation that includes Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–), and Malcolm X (1925–1965). King, a Baptist minister, drew on Gandhi's Hinduism to launch the civil rights movement and protest the Vietnam War. Heschel, a Hasidic Jew, marched with King and was himself a leader in the protest against the Vietnam War. King nominated the Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize for his non-violent struggles against the Vietnam War. And of course, Malcolm X argued with King about the merits of non-violence even as he moved closer to King after his conversion to traditional Islam.