Prophetic Ethics: Rufus Burrow, Jr.’s, Personalist Contribution to Religious Ethics

Abstract

religious ethicists use a variety of conceptual tools from many disciplines—for example, psychology, sociology, anthropology, theology, philosophy, political science, cognitive science, and neuroscience—to study various religious traditions. They use these interdisciplinary tools to study how these traditions influence and are influenced by the cultural mores and societal norms of the societies in which these traditions are practiced. If William Schweiker’s depiction of religious ethics in The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics is representative of the field’s emerging self-conception, then religious ethics is primarily a hermeneutical and multidimensional field (See Schweiker 2–3). Schweiker thinks that this means religious ethicists have begun to think of their field as a series “of critical, comparative, and constructive tasks of moral inquiry into religious resources undertaken from a hermeneutical standpoint and with respect to interlocking dimensions of reflection” (Schweiker 3). These tasks include critically inquiring into how various religious traditions are related to cultural mores and moral practices, comparing different religious traditions and their moral codes, constructively using religious moral traditions to address societal problems and, when possible, resolving current societal problems (See Schweiker 3). Given the comparative and normative tasks performed by religious ethicists, many forms of moral philosophy and moral theology have been well represented in the religious ethics literature. Yet, aside from religious ethicists mentioning Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, theologically-inspired social activism, ethical personalism of the Boston personalist variety has not been well represented in the field of religious ethics. This paper introduces those interested in religious ethics to ethical personalism of the Boston personalist variety. It