Abstract
Comparative religious ethics as a distinct field of inquiry links longstanding philosophical questions about the good and the right to the historical, social-scientific, and literary study of religious cultures. It has become, over its more than 30-year genesis, an intriguing conversation within religious studies. Contributions to that conversation have formed their own tradition of scholarship, in the sense of an ongoing argument prompted and guided by a shared set of questions about a subject matter: the practical implications of the beliefs and practices of the many religious communities around the globe.1 Many of the questions—about moral theory, virtue and culture, subjectivity, and language—that brought earlier generations of comparative ethics scholars together recur in the work of this volume’s authors, who view themselves as part of an ongoing project to understand the nature and direction of a distinctly religious ethics. Other questions—about the global significance of culturally specific practices that influence moral formation and cultural identity and about gender, embodiment, technology, and many other things—relate to the field’s earlier ones, but these new questions stand to become classics of their own in the future as religious ethics takes more seriously religious and cultural differences in light of the power and global scope of religious discourse.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The word “tradition” is, admittedly, a loaded term in religious (especially comparative) ethics. In what follows, I do not specify a definition of tradition although I do think it is helpful to establish certain parameters. With certain cautions, I would begin with Alasdair MacIntyre’s hypothesis that “A tradition is an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined in terms of two kinds of conflict: those with critics and enemies external to the tradition who reject all or at least key parts of those fundamental agreements, and those internal, interpretive debates through which the meaning and rationale of the fundamental agreements come to be expressed and by whose progress a tradition is constituted.” See Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 11.
This formulation of “tradition” is helpful to a certain extent in thinking about the meaning of religion and culture within a tradition, although MacIntyre’s own sense of his Catholic Christian tradition is both historically and philosophically expansive yet also extremely narrow in terms of the global variety of Catholic cultures and even the ritual (we would say liturgical) life of that community through history. For a critique of MacIntyre as narrowly Catholic, see David A. Clairmont, “Moral Disagreement and Inter-religious Conversation: The Penitential Pace of Understanding” in Intractable Disputes about the Natural Law: Alasdair MacIntyre and Critics, Lawrence S. Cunningham, ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 97–129. This critique roughly parallels Stout’s adoption of Okin’s critique of MacIntyre, emphasizing the difference between tradition as historical conversation about a conception of the good and the political construction of such conversations by authorities that leave out certain parties and their goods; see Jeffrey Stout, “Commitments and Traditions in the Study of Religious Ethics,” 25.3 (25th Anniversary Supplement, 1998), 135–6.
For a discussion of the status of classics, including classic religious texts, see David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981).
Francis, X. Clooney, S. J., Comparative Theology: Deep Learning Across Religious Borders (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 10.
By acknowledging the strong continuity of present conversations with earlier concerns in the field, I take my analysis to be broadly in line with two recent perspectives on the place of ethnography in comparative ethics: Thomas A. Lewis, “Ethnography, Anthropology, and Comparative Religious Ethics: Or Ethnography and the Comparative Religious Ethics Local,” Journal of Religious Ethics 38.3 (2010), 395–403;
John Kelsay, “Response to Papers for ‘Ethnography, Anthropology, and Comparative Religious Ethics’ Focus,” Journal of Religious Ethics 38.3 (2010), 485–93. What Lewis suggests of recent ethnographies, that they “highlight a plurality of views even within one so-called tradition” but also offer “an emphatic rejection of looking only at elites,” echoes my own concern about the presence of debates in traditions that are linked to multiple rather than single lines of self-reflection in traditions (399). Similarly, Kelsay’s advice that comparativists should continue to reflect on “Weber’s problematic—namely, what does it mean for human beings to exercise moral, political, and other responsibilities in a world increasingly dominated by instrumental rationality” echoes a similar process I see occurring within traditions—especially as they assess complementary and conflicting values in traditional cultures, modern society, and longstanding but culturally external religious traditions (492).
David Little, “Max Weber and the Comparative Study of Religious Ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 2.2 (1974), 34. Although I am not quite so suspicious of the influence of Foucault on recent comparative ethics as he, I have in preparing this chapter tried to follow John Kelsay’s counsel that comparativists return to this early article by David Little, and I have tried to draw appropriate analogies between his concerns and my comparative theological program in light of it.
Recent theological discourse has examined the notion of multiple audiences or publics to whom theological discourse is directed. At issue especially is whether theological discourse is always and only directed toward the public of the religious community in which it was produced. For a statement of theology as a discourse directed to the religious community, the academy, and the wider society, see David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981).
David Little and Sumner B. Twiss, Comparative Religious Ethics: A New Method (New York: Harper and Row, 1978)
John Ladd, The Structure of a Moral Code: A Philosophical Analysis of Ethical Discourse Applied to the Ethics of the Navaho Indians (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 3.
David Little and Sumner B. Twiss, Comparative Religious Ethics: A New Method (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 18–9.
In responding to critiques of their book, David Little characterized Swearer and Stout as two varieties of holism, which differed both from his and his co-author’s approach and also from the “grandtheories” of some early social scientific studies of religion and of the “apples-and-oranges” approach of some early theological studies of religions. See David Little, “The Present State of the Comparative Study of Religious Ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 9.2 (1981), 210–27.
Donald K. Swearer, “Nirvana, No-self, and Comparative Religious Ethics,” Religious Studies Review 6.4 (1980), 306. For example, Swearer noted that “Historians of religion charge that the deductive nature of the interpretation cannot adequately account for the multivalent and multidimensional nature of a religious system. Area specialists make a similar kind of charge but from an even broader cultural and historical perspective, arguing that such an approach inevitably distorts historical particularity and cultural uniqueness. Furthermore, students of religion who find the locus of religion in categories like ‘faith’ or ‘religious experience’ are troubled by the insistence on definitional exactness as an a priori or necessary condition of the enterprise, agreeing with Weber that such definition—‘if attempted at all’—should come at the end rather than the beginning” (302).
Stout’s critiques of Little and Twiss were published and republished in a series of essays: first in Jeffrey Stout, “Weber’s Progeny, Once Removed,” Religious Studies Review 6.4 (1980), 289–95
[later republished slightly revised in Jeffrey Stout, The Flight from Authority: Religion, Morality and the Quest for Autonomy (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 201–27];
continued in Jeffery Stout, “Holism and Comparative Ethics: A Response to Little,” Journal of Religious Ethics 11.2 (1983), 301–16. Just as Stout’s critique of Little and Twiss sought to destabilize their claims to revive aspects of a Weberian project hoping for some objectivity and normative detachment from the material studies, Stout offered a similar critique of Alasdair MacIntyre and John Milbank for offering strategic distortions and decontextualizations of early and late modern thinkers to maintain narratives about the death of the liberal project and the coherence of religious traditions. See his “Commitments and Traditions in the Study of Religious Ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 25.3 (25th Anniversary Supplement, 1998), 23–56.
Jeffrey Stout, “Weber’s Progeny, Once Removed,” Religious Studies Review 6.4 (1980), 293.
For the characterization of “waves” of scholarship in comparative ethics, see Elizabeth M. Bucar, “Methodological Invention as a Constructive Project: Exploring the Production of Ethical Knowledge through the Interaction of Discursive Knowledge,” Journal of Religious Ethics 36.3 (2008), 355–73.
For an important exception to this absence, see Thomas A. Lewis, “Frames of Comparison: Anthropology and Inheriting Traditional Practices,” Journal of Religious Ethics 33.2 (2005), 225–53. Although Lewis has limited his engagements in explicit interreligious comparisons, his attempts to probe a philosophical system (Hegel) for its significance for comparative method are precisely the sort of advances that may bring some clarity to this issue.
See Paul J. Griffiths, “Denaturalizing Discourse: Ābhidhārmikas, Propositionalists, and the Comparative Philosophy of Religion,” in Myth and Philosophy, Frank E. Reynolds and David Tracy, eds. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 57–91.
See Frank E. Reynolds, “Four Modes of Theravada Action,” Journal of Religious Ethics 7.1 (1979): 12–26;
Frank E. Reynolds, “Multiple Cosmogonies and Ethics: The Case of Theravāda Buddhism,” in Cosmogony and Ethical Order: New Studies in Comparative Ethics, Robin W. Lovin and Frank E. Reynolds, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
Lee H. Yearley, “Selves, Virtues, Odd Genres, and Alien Guides: An Approach to Religious Ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 25.3 (25th Anniversary Supplement, 1998), 129.
Lee H. Yearley, “Ideas of Ethical Excellence,” in The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics, William Schweiker, ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 51.
Although he does not explicitly acknowledge this, the criteria for emendation accountable to both a religious tradition and to a “common human experience” bear a remarkable resemblance to those enunciated by David Tracy’s theological revisionist method of “critical correlation.” See David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 43–63.
See David A. Clairmont, “Persons as Religious Classics: Comparative Ethics and the Theology of Bridge Concepts,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78.3 (2010), 687–720.
See Paulinus Odozor, “Classical Catholic Moral Theology and the World Church: Some Suggestions on How to Move Forward,” Louvain Studies 30 (2005), 276–98.
See also James F. Keenan, ed. Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church: The Plenary Papers from the First Cross-cultural Conference in Catholic Theological Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2007).
H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1951), 39.
See Richard B. Miller, “On Making a Cultural Turn in Religious Ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 33.3 (2005), 409–10. For a similar focus on everyday practices as a resources for comparative ethics, see the chapters by Lewis and Kao in this volume.
For example, Anthony Gittens cites both Tylor’s late-nineteenth-century definition from Primitive Culture—“that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”—and Geertz’s late-twentieth-century definition from The Interpretation of Cultures—“a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which human beings communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about, and their attitudes towards, life.” See Anthony J. Gittens, “Beyond Liturgical Inculturation: Transforming the Deep Structures of Faith,” Irish Theological Quarterly 69 (2004), 47–72.
Aylward Shorter, Toward a Theology of Inculturation (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1999), 4–5; cited in Gittens, 48.
Anthony J. Gittens, “Beyond Liturgical Inculturation: Transforming the Deep Structures of Faith,” Irish Theological Quarterly 69 (2004), 48.
See Gittens, 49. See also Paulinus Ikechukwu Odozor, “An African Moral Theology of Inculturation: Methodological Considerations,” Theological Studies 69 (2008), 583–609.
Bénézet Bujo, Foundations of an African Ethic: Beyond the Universal Claims of Western Morality, Brian McNeil, trans. (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2001), 73.
Paulinus Ikechukwu Odozor, “An African Moral Theology of Inculturation: Methodological Considerations,” Theological Studies 69 (2008), 594.
Jean-Marc Ela, My Faith as an African, John Pairman Brown and Susan Perry, trans. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), vi.
Bénézet Bujo, African Christian Morality at the Age of Inculturation (Nairobi: St. Paul Publications—African, 1990), 126
(cited in Diane B. Stinton, Jesus of Africa: Voices of Contemporary African Christology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004), 50).
Jean-Marc Ela, African Cry, Robert R. Barr, trans. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986), 29.
See Emmanuel Martey, African Theology: Inculturation and Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993). Martey offers the helpful summary of the theological geography of liberation movements in sub-Saharan Africa: “[T]he colonial legacy has divided sub-Saharan Africa into at least six fragments: anglophone Africa, francophone Africa, Portuguese Africa, Belgian Africa, Spanish Africa and apartheid South Africa. Of these, anglophone and francophone Africa and South Africa form the three major zones where theological activity has been the most intense … while in independent Africa the Negritude movement in francophone Africa and African personality in anglophone Africa contributed significantly to the emergence of African theology of indiginization (or inculturation), in apartheid South Africa, the Black consciousness movement contributed immensely to the emergence of Black theology of liberation” (1).
Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator, From Crisis to Kairos: The Mission of the Church in the Time of HIV/AIDS, Refugees and Poverty (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 2005), 69.
Paul J. Griffiths, Problems of Religious Diversity (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 7.
James L. Fredericks, “Interreligious Friendship: A New Theological Virtue,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 35.2 (1998), 159–74.
Charles Hallisey, “In Defense of Rather Fragile and Local Achievement: Reflections on the Work of Gurulugomi,” in Religion and Practical Reason: New Essays in the Comparative Philosophy of Religions, Frank E. Reynolds’ and David Tracy, eds. (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), 150.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2012 Elizabeth M. Bucar and Aaron Stalnaker
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Clairmont, D.A. (2012). Cultures of Comparison and Traditions of Scholarship: Holism and Inculturation in Religious Ethics. In: Bucar, E.M., Stalnaker, A. (eds) Religious Ethics in a Time of Globalism. Palgrave Macmillan’s Content and Context in Theological Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137273031_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137273031_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44511-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-27303-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)