ETHICS IN THE WORLD RELIGIONS

Edited by Joseph Runzo and Nancy M. Martin

Introduction: Inter-Religious Understanding

Nancy M. Martin

The challenge of inter-religious understanding has a new urgency and new dimensions in our day and for our increasingly global world community, but this challenge has been with us for a long time. In some parts of the world, like India, the encounter with people from different religious traditions has been a daily fact of life for centuries. Hindus of many different persuasions - Buddhists, Muslims, Jains, Sikhs, Christians, and even small and very ancient communities of Jews and Parsis - have long lived together in villages across the South Asian subcontinent and have shared each other's holy days and rituals, honored each other's saints, and debated and appreciated each other's religious teachings. Medieval poet-saints like Kabir have called for Hindus and Muslims to realize the sameness of the God they worship, just as there have also sometimes been violent conflicts, particularly when religion, communal identity, and politics have been interwoven.

We can learn much from the Indian case, for the inter-religious encounter there has not been abstract but personal and immediate. Take for example one recent evening when I was in western Rajasthan in north India, not far from the Indian border with southern Pakisthan. Darkness had fallen and a dozen people converged on the courtyard outside a simple, small dwelling. The visitors, dressed in finery for the occasion, were directed to sit outside on string cots covered with brightly colored fabric mats, and a kerosene lamp was brought to offer a soft circle of light. Everyone's spirits were high, and there was great anticipation of the meal to come. This was a time of celebration. The Muslim hosts were observing one of the five pillars of Islam - fasting between sunrise and sundown everyday for the entire lunar month of Ramadan - and the day's fasting had come to an end. There was much laughter and conversation, and the spicy array of goat meat and vegetables with fresh flat bread called chapatis or rotis was eaten with relish (though some did not partake of the meat).

Gathered in that courtyard were Muslims but also Jains, Hindus, and Christians. Though this was a distinctly religious occasion and a decidedly Muslim one, it was joyously shared by others of different faiths - a difference that was not merely tolerated but celebrated, enjoyed, relished. Similar gatherings are held throughout the month of Ramadan in many villages and on the occasions of other Hindu and Muslim holy days. In this village world, those belonging to other religions are friends and neighbors, and this mutual appreciation and celebration is much more characteristic of India than the sporadic violence inflamed by religious rhetoric which is the stuff of newspaper articles or television news.

Unlike in India, in many parts of the world it was possible until quite recently to live without truly encountering people with radically different religious beliefs. But it is now becoming increasingly impossible and, indeed, undesirable, to live in religiously homogeneous or isolated communities. And though dialogue might begin with an attempt to explain the teachings of one's own tradition to another (possibly with the intent of conversion) and with the comparison of religious experience, it often very quickly moves into the exploration of how we might be able to live harmoniously with one another, treating each other with dignity and respect, and how we might work together for the betterment of the world.

Perhaps we might never reconcile divergent religious worldviews and truth claims, but dialogue can lead to a firmer basis for mutual action in the world, for standing together to denounce injustice and to promote the welfare of all. If we are going to work together, we will need to understand each other, to find our common ground, and to learn to appreciate and even celebrate our differences. The majority of the world's population is religious, and although some continue to predict the imminent demise of the world religions, these religions are playing an increasing rather than decreasing role on the world stage. So much of our understanding of what is right and wrong and how we think about the way we should act in the world is grounded in our understanding of the nature and meaning of life, an understanding that for the majority of the people in the world is circumscribed by religion.

Potentially the world religions have much to offer. Their potential power is evidenced by the continuing political use of religion. But the challenges before us are great and global in scale - famine in a world of surplus; violent ethnic conflict; the horrific violation of rights and human dignity based on gender, race, sexual orientation, and political affiliation; the exploitation and destruction of the environment. We will need all the resources we can muster, and this includes the powerful ethical motivation that flows from the committed religious life, whether one is a Muslim or a Buddhist or a Confucian or a Christian.

In the global twenty-first century, inter-religious understanding is not an optional or idle intellectual pursuit. This volume and the larger series of which it is a part, "The Library of Global Ethics and Religion," take up the challenge to further mutual understanding among religions, particularly with regard to the basic ethical principles they hold and the resources they might bring to their adherents and to the global community as we face pressing ethical challenges. This focus on ethics is a fundamental characteristic of inter-religious encounter at the beginning of the twenty-first century. But how did we get to this point?

Inter-Religious Encounter in the Past

Religions have always been in conversation with each other, especially those in geographic proximity and particularly when what will become a new religion is in its formative stages. Clearly early Judaism had to come to terms with the religions of the surrounding people in order to differentiate itself and then maintain that distinctive identity. That this was no easy task is clear from the references to the Canaanites and others in the Hebrew scriptures. And the question of how much to adapt to changing circumstances and cultural contexts and what elements are essential to being a Jew is a recurring theme in the history of Judaism, separating the distinctive branches of reform, conservative, and orthodox Judaism today.

Christianity began within Judaism, and its earliest members, including its leader Jesus, understood themselves to be Jewish. Only with time did the followers of Jesus come to understand themselves as a new and distinct tradition, in part as a response to non-Jewish converts who questioned whether following the laws of Judaism was essential to the central teachings of Jesus. Muhammad grew up among Jews and Christians and saw his revelation as directly in line with that of the Jewish and Christian traditions. It was their resistance to his revelation more than anything else that first drew the line between them.

In South Asia six centuries before the birth of Jesus and twelve hundred years before Muhammad, Buddhism and Jainism grew up along with the Upanishadic traditions of Hinduism, reacting against some aspects of the existing tradition while embracing others. Indeed until only very recently, many Jains identified themselves as being within the inclusive fold of Hinduism (though now because of the politicization of religion in contemporary India and the assigning of special privileges to religious minorities, it has become expedient to assert Jain separateness). Daoism and Confucianism grew up together in China also from the sixth century BCE, and in part defined themselves against each other. In the Daoist philosopher Chuang Tzu's humorous stories, Confucius and his followers often appear as the misguided foil to a Daoist adept. When Buddhism entered China around 0 CE, these traditions were well established, and there was initial resistance to Buddhist monastic leanings as antithetical to the central value placed on family in Confucianism.

New forms of Buddhism arose in China. Two schools, T'ien T'ai and Hua-yen, reflected the Chinese (both Daoist and Confucian) focus on harmony by integrating the various and sometimes seemingly conflicting Buddhist teachings and texts into unified systems, and Ch'an (Zen) emerged out of the confluence of Buddhism and Daoism. Confucianism responded to Buddhism by developing a meditational inner dimension in its Neo-Confucian forms. But these religions also co-exist in the lives of individuals who, in Japan for example, identify themselves as followers of Buddhism, Shinto, and Confucianism, with these different traditions seen not as competitive but as playing different roles and answering different needs in a single life. Indeed one might even be both a Christian and a Buddhist; as Japanese Christian friends explained to me, they are culturally Buddhist, incorporating many Buddhist elements into their lives, and religiously Christian.

Colonialism, Denigration, and Romanticization

When religions are not in geographic proximity, or when that proximity involves only isolated individuals or is the result of slavery or colonial domination, then inter-religious understanding is often more limited, as we find in early encounters between "Western" Christians and "other" religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. Though some of the writings of travelers, missionaries, and colonializers showed deep appreciation, most accounts were marked by an emphasis on the "otherness," the utter differentness of those encountered. As European Christendom has often done with Muslims, what they saw was an inverse of themselves - an "other" who was alternately exotic or the embodiment of either all those things they wished they were or all the things they did not want to admit they were or potentially might be. In the latter case, this often meant that the "other" was seen as backward, stupid, childlike, superstitious, weak, cruel, immoral, and, in the colonialist rhetoric of hyper-masculinity, effeminate. An example of today's version of this would be the false images perpetuated in the American media of all Muslims as violent terrorists who oppress women.

Many Christians saw "polytheists" everywhere (a term whose meaning is primarily "not monotheist") and the unsaved who, if not converted, were all destined for eternal damnation. Such a view left little room for an appreciation of the religions of these "others." Further when Protestant Christians looked at Hindu ritual practice, they saw what seemed to be both the idolatry condemned in the Hebrew scriptures and the kind of superstition and blind slavery to priests that they had rejected in the name of Enlightenment rationality and the Reformation. Such an understanding (or lack thereof) bolstered the British justification of their right to rule over India - they were, after all, moral people who could justify ruling over others only if they saw themselves as superior and helping an inferior people.

On the other hand, some European colonial officers and certain early scholars saw in India a mystic and spiritual depth that seemed to have been lost in the industrial revolution and materialistic focus of the West. They romanticized India. But again, what they saw was a reflection of themselves rather than India or Hinduism in itself. (This kind of romanticization is with us still, particularly in the way Buddhism is seen in America today. The strictness of the true Zen Buddhist monastic life in Japan would quickly shatter most American images of Buddhism.) At the same time, some Indians in South Asia, struggling to define themselves and reclaim their own heritage in the face of British colonial domination and technological superiority, also embraced the idea of Hindu spiritual superiority. They accepted the critiques of Hindu ritual practices and located the true Hindu tradition in the distant past and the texts of the Upanishads and interpretations of the Vedas that they claimed were the more ancient and true.

Though there is considerable variation in the nature of interaction through the nineteenth century, inter-religious encounter was marked primarily by a sense of the radical difference between world religions.

The First Parliament of the World's Religions

In 1893, however, a watershed event took place in the history of inter-religious encounter for the West. The Parliament of World Religions was organized at the World's Fair in Chicago, with the intent of bringing together leaders of the world's religions to promote inter-religious understanding (though the organizers were primarily American Protestant Christians). Many of those invited refused to attend - the Archbishop of Canterbury would not come, since he considered only Christianity to be true; the Sultan of Turkey's similar refusal prompted the Arab Islamic nations to do likewise; and Japanese Zen monks tried in vain to persuade their master Soyen Shaku that it would be unseemly for him to go to such an uncivilized country as the United States. The hope of the organizers of the Parliament, however, was to provide a venue where leaders of each tradition could present their traditions to each other without condemnation.

Although the Christian delegates showed an open appreciation of other traditions, they did not see them as the equal of Christianity. Japanese Buddhists openly challenged Christian judgment of their tradition because the Christians knew little about Buddhism, and, encountering signs banning Japanese from some establishments, claimed that they preferred to remain "heathens" if this prejudicial treatment represented Christian ethical behavior. Further they challenged the notion that only one religion could be right or that people must follow only one - in Japan this was not the case.

Swami Vivekananda of India made perhaps the greatest impact. Vivekananda spoke from the Bhagavad Gita of the multiple paths of Hinduism and the unity of all. "Hinduism" is itself an inclusivist term, originally coined by outsiders and referring merely to the people on the other side of the Indus (that is, on the whole South Asian subcontinent) and later applied to the wide range of religious orientations found in this geographic region. But the fundamental affirmation of the oneness of Ultimate Reality in Hindu traditions also supports an inclusiveness that is widespread, even among unsophisticated and formally uneducated Hindus. When I was riding on a bus through rural Rajasthan, a poor farmer asked me who my ishtadev was (in what form did I worship God?). Seeking to show understanding, I spoke of God being one. The man said rather impatiently, well of course God is one, but who is your ishtadev? On a grander scale, Vivekananda's teacher Ramakrishna had visionary encounters with Muhammad and with Christ which affirmed the ultimate unity of religious paths. Although many delegates at the Parliament were not yet ready to accept this Hindu inclusivity, they were deeply impressed with Vivekananda's philosophical and theological presentation of Hinduism, which offered them an appealing glimpse of a tradition radically different from their previous understandings.

There was a general call toward universality and common ground at the Parliament and an affirmation that revelation was not confined to any one tradition and that all had perceptions of truth and the real. Ethical considerations were raised, both challenging the religious institutions themselves and also calling for religious people to work together and to strive to live up to their own high ideals. Critical voices, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was in the process of writing The Woman's Bible at the time, spoke out against racism and sexism across traditions and called for attention to the plight of the poor. Notably, however, there was a complete silence with regard to Native American traditions - it was as if Americans were as completely blind to these "other" religions as they had been to practitioners of various African indigenous religious traditions and African Muslims among the slave populations. Forced conversion to Christianity marked much of the encounter with Native traditions, with European Americans seemingly unable to recognize these other traditions as religions, and the massacre at Wounded Knee had happened only three years before.

Commonality and Difference

After the first Parliament true inter-religious dialogue began in earnest. The intensive translation work that was initiated in the nineteenth century continued and increased, making a vast array of new material available to the wider world, and there was a shift away from the radical "othering" of different traditions toward a search for the commonality between traditions.

Religious experience and particularly mystical experience seemed to be a point where the traditions might meet, for the descriptions of those experiences sounded similar and often seemed to transcend the particulars of doctrine and practice. William James published The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902, mapping out the characteristics of a mystical experience that is seemingly common to all religions and beyond the distinctive content of particular religious beliefs. The German scholar Rudolph Otto explored this issue further in The Idea of the Holy (1923) and Mysticism East and West (1932), offering his now famous notion of the encounter with the Divine as the numinous - mysterium tremendom and fascinans, invoking in the human being a sense of awe and humility, passion and yearning, and the experience of the "wholly other." In so doing, he was reclaiming for religion the suprarational experience of this reality, a consciousness of which must be awakened in us rather than taught (and arguing against the "masters of suspicion" - Feuerbach, Freud, and Marx - who had radically challenged the validity of all religion).

Even as he found this universal, however, Otto's language remained thoroughly Christian - the commonality he saw was a "like us" kind of commonality - a reflection of his own Christian context. As he developed his comparison between East and West, he showed a deep appreciation for Shankara, the eighth-century formulator of Advaita Vedanta, but in the end it was clear that he made his comparison in order to judge traditions. In the final analysis his judgment was a resounding affirmation of Christianity which he saw as the culmination of the evolution of the spiritual consciousness of humanity, even as Christian delegates attending the Parliament in 1893 had. And much of the comparative study in the first half of the twentieth century shared this same orientation (although James managed largely to avoid this pitfall).

The openness in the West to the possibility that religions other than Christianity might contain truth began to encompass wider and wider circles. In the radical reforms of the most recent council of the Roman Catholic Church, Vatican II, in the early 1960s, the Dogmatic Constitution regarding Catholic attitudes toward the other religions of the world is inclusivist, affirming that there may be truth in other religions, calling for respect for their practices and teachings, and encouraging dialogue and the acknowledgment and support of "the spiritual and moral goods found among these [people], as well as the values of their society and culture." Although still asserting the final and ultimate truth of Christianity, the roots of this inclusivist vision are traced back in the document to the writings of the early church fathers.

We must keep in mind that what we recognize as common we too often assume is just like us, imposing our meanings and experiences on those of others. Indeed some academics reacted against such claims of religious commonality and sameness for this reason, asserting that religions are in fact so radically different that they cannot be compared. The emphasis shifted to preserving and exploring difference as the pendulum swung back to the need to recognize that other religious traditions were not simply variants of "us." A positive result of this swing was that scholars became much more careful about speaking in generalities about other traditions (and their own) and much more attentive to their assumptions and positioning within a given tradition. But not everyone accepted such a radical return to seeing other religions as completely different from one's own.

During the latter decades of the twentieth century, dialogue between religious leaders to enhance understanding began in earnest. Following the model of the early Parliament, this was first and foremost an explanation and defense of one's own tradition to another. But progressing beyond this, the dialogue included using the other's tradition to then explain one's own tradition in their terms by comparison and contrast. A fine example of this can be found in the work of the Kyoto School Zen philosophers who worked to explain Buddhism through a comparison with Western philosophy and Christianity. The aim was not to convert one's dialogue partners but to deepen understanding. Key is a recognition and mutual appreciation, across the boundaries of religious traditions, of a common spiritual depth coming out of disciplined religious practice, though there might not be agreement on metaphysical and theological issues. The Catholic Church in particular has sponsored formal dialogues between Catholics and leaders and practitioners of Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and other branches and denominations within the Christian fold.

In addition to promoting mutual understanding, these encounters often led to the rediscovery of forgotten elements and untapped potential within the participants' own traditions. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Sultan of Turkey had seen no reason for dialogue in 1893, but Buddhists and Christians gained much from their encounters in the next century. In the case of Christianity, the encounter with Buddhism (and forms of Hinduism) led to a re-examination of the meditative prayer traditions within medieval Christianity as religious leaders asked why young people raised within their fold might be turning to other traditions - what was missing from the Christianity they were being taught? Some Roman Catholics also began to practice Zen-style meditation in a Catholic context, even in monasteries. Buddhists like Thich Nhat Hanh in turn encountered Christian charity in practice and recognized these practicing Christians as embodying the Buddhist ideal of the bodhisattva in a way that most Buddhists were not encouraged to do. Out of this realization came the movements for socially engaged Buddhism drawing Buddhist compassion into the realm of social action. Christians did not become Buddhists or Buddhists Christians, but the practice of each was enhanced in the encounter.

Two more Parliaments of the World Religions were also convened in 1993 and 1999, the first in Chicago and the second in Cape Town. These gatherings again provided a forum for religious leaders to present their traditions to receptive audiences seeking deeper understanding and appreciation and were marked by celebrations of the abundant richness of human religiosity. But they also had a central focus on ethical action. At the 1993 gathering, under the leadership of Hans Kung, delegates issued an "Initial Declaration for a Global Ethic." It was clear to all concerned that religions had both a power and an obligation to provide leadership in the ethical realm. The aim of this project was to find a common ground - a shared floor to begin building ethical consensus - one marked by a commitment to "nonviolence and respect for life," "solidarity and a just economic order," "tolerance and a life of truthfulness," and "equal rights and the partnership of men and women." Given the history of earlier "universalizing," any such attempts must be approached with great caution, but members of the world's religions and organizers of the Parliament felt very strongly that the world religions had an ethical role to play, and this was one way to begin the discussion.

At the third meeting of the Parliament in Cape Town this focus on ethics continued with a call to the guiding social, political, economic, and religious institutions of the world to act for a more just and peaceful world. When the Dalai Lama addressed the Parliament in the final days, he took this commitment one step further, calling delegates and religious leaders to join together to engage in concrete action - to go to Bosnia, for example - to make a real difference in the world. And parliamentary debate of the call to guiding institutions resulted in many participants finding specific ways to bring about change in the institutions in which they participated in their home countries. This represents an immense shift from a century before, when the focus was primarily on listening and coming to understand each other.

Let me offer one concrete example of the kind of inter-religious action the Dalai Lama was advocating, again from India. In early 2000, a Christian missionary and his two children were burned alive in their hut. Ostensibly this was because they were converting people, and Hindus had to defend their faith against such incursions. But such violent anti-Christian sentiment is not the norm in India, and further investigation showed the killings to be politically motivated. Leaders of all the religions of India and beyond - Christians, Jains, Sikhs, Hindus, Parsis, Jews, and Buddhists - came to that place to honor this man who had served lepers for years as a physician and to denounce this kind of violence couched in religious terms. Such solidarity across religious lines offered a powerful and very public challenge to the individuals and institutions who would perpetuate such acts even as it diffused retaliatory violence.

Ethics in the World Religions for the Twenty-First Century

As we move into the twenty-first century, there is a need to affirm both commonality and difference in religious perspectives on ethical issues. Religious differences need not be a "problem" to be eliminated but may rather be a source of expansion and creative interchange, as important as biodiversity for our mutual flourishing. Christian liberation theologies, engaged Buddhism, and the nonviolence of Gandhi all prefigure what must be a part of religion's increasing role in this new millennium, as an active force for social change.

In the first volume of this series, entitled The Meaning of Life in the World Religions, John Hick suggests that religions offer a source of "cosmic optimism" - a deep source of hope in the face of the world's struggles. And Huston Smith echoes this, suggesting that, by addressing life's most fundamental problems and most profound suffering and by offering the greatest possible hope, religion provides the greatest possible motivation to solve these problems and also posits the unequaled support of divine grace. Keith Ward further suggests that those of us who are religious will do well both to recognize that we all travel toward similar transformations of our individual selves into people marked by "wisdom, compassion, and bliss" who act in care for others rather than for self alone, and to agree to travel together encouraging our hopes and supporting shared ethical action grounded in our different but not necessarily conflicting senses of ultimate purpose and meaning. Though religion may not be an absolutely necessary ingredient for a meaningful life, these scholars affirm the unparalleled power of a religious perspective to give greater meaning, hope, and motivation - all deeply needed in our world today.

The essays in this volume take up the challenge of inter-religious understanding and examine the ethical resources offered by the world religions. The volume begins with an exploration of the fundamental connection between ethics and religion and the possibilities and difficulties of understanding and finding agreement across traditions. Joseph Runzo sets the framework for the discussion by analyzing the nature of ethics and the relation of the moral life to the religious life. He argues that "metaphysics drives ethics," and explores the manner in which people from different religious traditions and thus with different metaphysics might reach ethical agreement. To that end, he defines the moral point of view and addresses what place religion might have in a global ethic. Keith Ward then explores the possible basis for such a global ethic, identifying benevolence, truthfulness, liberty, and justice as basic shared moral values, though they may be interpreted differently across religious traditions. The most important contribution of religions to the search for a universal ethic, he argues, is in terms of both the emphasis within religious traditions on the need to overcome ego-centeredness and the affirmation that these highest values are not only arrived at by human reflection but are truly grounded in reality itself.

James Kellenberger then explores the nature of moral diversity, setting forth a notion of moral pluralism that parallels John Hick's religious pluralism and arguing for the pre-eminent importance of relationships as the ground for moral decision making, a theme that will be picked up in other chapters as well. According to him, a fundamental affirmation of basic human relationships lies at the heart of the religious perspective and the religious motivation for ethical action. This theme of relationality is developed in subsequent chapters with respect to the ethics of individual traditions and in relation to issues such as the ethics of transplants and the need for an ecological ethic. And indeed an increasing focus on relationality will undoubtedly also be a dominant theme in inter-religious encounter in the twenty-first century.

The wider questions of religion and ethics having been delineated, the next section of the volume focuses on specific religious traditions in both the West and the East. Elliot Dorff offers a comprehensive look at ethics and morality in Judaism, exploring the Jewish version of Divine Command theory and the values that shape individual Jews, the Jewish community, and Jewish ethical decision making - the integrated and positive understanding of the body which ultimately belongs to God, the meaning of all people being created in the image of God, and the importance of family, education, and community. Zayn Kassam then turns to the Islamic tradition, exploring the resources for ethical decision making within Islam, particularly with regard to matters not addressed directly in the Qur'an. She then takes up two issues that specifically harm women within some Islamic cultures and which are often justified as "Islamic" - female genital mutilation and honor killings - and shows both how culture and religion become entangled and how, using fundamentally Islamic strategies of ethical decision making as well as the Qur'an, these practices might be challenged.

The latter two essays in this section address Christianity. Nathan Tierney explores traditional understandings of the soul in the face of the challenges of modern science, advocating a non-reductionist evolutionary notion of the self in a move to heal the split between the spiritual and the material, the body and the soul, and to affirm the interrelationality of the human - a fundamental shift in worldview which would have serious and important implications for Christian ethical practice. Philip Rossi analyzes the redefinition and relativizing of life's meaning in contemporary society, leaving little room for other-directed action and little motivation for ethical living in a culture of unconcern. He then suggests that Christianity and other religious traditions must offer a voice of challenge in the midst of this crisis of indifference through a re-imagining and reawakening of an awareness of the spiritual dimension (and higher callings) of human beings and of a Transcendent Reality beyond the human.

Having examined aspects of ethics and religion in the West, we then turn to the East. Vasudha Narayanan details the concept of dharma as it relates to ethics in Hinduism and examines how the laws recorded in dharma shastra texts play out in real life situations, specifically in the context of renunciation and reproduction. Dale Wright turns to Buddhism and the cultivation of the six perfections (generosity, morality, patience, energy, meditation, and wisdom) that characterize the ideal Buddhist and are epitomized by the lay bodhisattva Vimalakirti. He demonstrates in a powerful way how Buddhist understandings of dependent co-origination shape notions of ethical responsibility through the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, who claimed a responsibility for the beating of Rodney King by police in Los Angeles in 1991. Christopher Key Chapple then introduces us to Jain purification practices and vows, undergirded by a deep commitment to nonviolence. Ethical concerns for other beings drive these Jain ascetic practices, and their nonviolence extends also to a nonviolent approach to those holding other religious views, as the example of Haribhadra makes clear, and to a commitment to fight violence on a global scale. In the final chapter in this section, John Berthrong gives us a window onto the current conversations within Confucianism as adherents ask themselves what shape their tradition will take in the coming century. A fundamental call for the active development of "concern-consciousness" in addition to "civility" emerges from recent gatherings in China.

Having explored these separate traditions, we then turn to the ways in which different religious traditions might challenge and assist each other in the face of pressing ethical concerns. Daniel Smith-Christopher examines the strategies used by Jews, Christians, and Muslims as they look to their own scriptures for support for nonviolence, suggesting that the Christian strategy of developmental evolution from violence to nonviolence within the tradition may not be the best - sawing off the branch on which one is sitting so to speak - and that the uncovering of elements of nonviolence throughout the history of the tradition, including the early Hebrew scriptures (as he finds in Jewish and Muslim commentaries), appears a more promising strategy.

William LaFleur explores the issue of organ transplantation in medical ethics, showing how Christians and Jews in American readily and almost unquestioningly embraced this practice in the 1960s (in spite of earlier understandings of a connection between the bodily integrity of a corpse and resurrection and considerable differences between the two traditions with regard to attitudes toward the body, as Elliot Dorff makes clear in chapter 4). LaFleur clearly demonstrates that the issue is not so cut and dried, by contrasting it with Japanese Buddhist/Confucian opposition toward cadaveric transplantation, fundamentally in terms of the violation of relationships, and through careful examination of the actual arguments given for it, particularly by Joseph Fletcher, identifying organ donation as the epitome of agape or unconditional love in the Christian case.

Vrinda Dalmiya takes the opposite tack, addressing a problem within feminist care ethics of "caring" action potentially contributing to the self-sacrifice and oppression of the care-giver. She draws on classical Indian traditions to enrich the understanding of care, through a retelling of several episodes from the classic Hindu epic of the Mahabharata and a detailed examination of a parallel term to Western notions of care - anukrosha. In so doing, she offers an alternative vision of autonomous and uncoerced action that strengthens rather than denigrates the individual and radically alters the way moral imperatives play out, again with an emphasis on the fundamental importance of relationships in ethical considerations.

In the final section of the volume, Brian Hebblethwaite, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and C. Ram-Prasad explore the global implications of particular traditions. Hebblethwaite begins by offering a comprehensive account of the discussions within Christianity over whether there is a genuine Christian social ethic at all and then what might be unique about it and where common ground might be found with other religious ethics and with secular ethics. He concludes with an exploration of the place of religion generally and Christian ethics specifically in the context of global ethical consensus and action. Mary Evelyn Tucker addresses the environmental crisis and explores how the fundamental understandings of the nature of the world in terms of the holistic qi (matter-energy or vital force) and the structuring principles of li found in Confucianism might provide useful insight for the restructuring of human attitudes toward the non-human world which is essential to creating a global environmental ethic. The volume concludes with C. Ram-Prasad's explication of the Jaina doctrine of anekantavada or "multiplism" as a possible way to approach inter-religious understanding and moral pluralism with an ethic of toleration and nonviolence.

In their exploration of the confluence of religion and ethics, the essays in this volume contribute significantly toward advancing these newest directions in inter-religious understanding - the generation of ethical insight when issues are viewed from alternative religious worldviews, the deepening perception of the fundamental relationality of humans and the world embedded in and affirmed by the teachings of diverse religions, and the exploration of the specific and vital contribution that the world's religions might and indeed must make in the realm of ethical action in our increasingly global world.