A Global Ethic Update

Abstract

One of the most enduring fruits of the World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in the fall of 1993 was the statement signed by attendees, Declaration Toward a Ethic. The statement is an attempt on the part of the author (Hans Kung) and the signatories (representatives of the world's religious traditions) to find and articulate a set of common ethical mandates already present in the world's religious traditions. These ethical foundations are grouped under four headings in the declaration: nonviolence, solidarity, tolerance, and equal rights. Like all such statements, no matter how prescient, certain life stages seem to attend its existence and influence. The declaration has gone through the stages of original writing, editing, and agreement, and is now in the crucial stage of dissemination. If, as the statement declares, its aim is to to the common ethical basis already present in the world's religions, then the current task of its custodians is to bring to the consciousness of as many people as possible the statement itself. With this in mind, Hans Kuing, along with K. K. von der Groeben and Karl-Josef Kuschel have created an organization, the Ethic Foundation (Stiftung Weltethos), to do that kind of consciousness raising. The Ethic Foundation (GEF) will pursue this objective through three initiatives: research, education, and encounter. The audience for these initiatives is broad, ranging from academics and thought leaders, to the general public, to adolescents and schoolchildren. One project, for example, Good Neighborliness, is centered on a school in North-Rhine-Westphalia and aims at developing measures to build mutual respect and trust among the different religions and cultures of that city. Another, according to the GEF's literature, is a project called Global Ethics Youth Camp, which brings together young Christians, Jews, and Muslims to share their diverse religious traditions and to experience personally the meaning of the global ethics theme. Whether or not these localized initiatives succeed in their tasks and begin a groundswell of support and imitation is, of course, difficult to predict. The rapid development of the GEF movement leads one to be optimistic. Hans Kung published a book in 1990, Responsibility, that