Cultures of Comparison and Traditions of Scholarship: Holism and Inculturation in Religious Ethics

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.KeywordsReligious TraditionReligious CommunityIntellectual HistoryComparative PhilosophyReligious DiscourseThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.