Columbia University Press has just released What Matters?: Ethnographies of Value in a Not So Secular Age, edited by Courtney Bender and Ann Taves.
Posts Tagged ‘ethics’
February 27th, 2012
A response to three readers
posted by Robert N. Bellah
I am grateful to Mark Juergensmeyer for organizing a panel on my book at the November 2011 meetings of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), only a couple of months after publication. Given a somewhat different response from the American Sociological Association (ASA) I can only say that although I have never taught in a university with a department of religious studies, I am as much a religious studies person as a sociologist. Or perhaps better, I can say that I am a sociologist in the image of my own teacher, Talcott Parsons, who never recognized any disciplinary boundary and tended to define sociology as concerned with the world and its contents.
I am also grateful to the three panelists who spoke so graciously at the panel and who have provided written versions of their comments. I tried to respond to them ex tempore at the event and have seen a video of my remarks, but I will use this occasion to give a more considered answer to the many questions they raised, having to deal with some overlap between them as I go along.
January 5th, 2012
Axial axioms
posted by Wendy DonigerThe word “magisterial” in publishers’ blurbs usually means little more than “too long,” and indeed Religion in Human Evolution is very long, but it is also magisterial in many of the ways that the Oxford English Dictionary suggests: “Of, relating to, designating, or befitting a master, teacher, or other person qualified to speak with authority; masterly, authoritative, commanding.” It is certainly all of those, a book full of the wisdom and erudition that comes only when someone quite brilliant has thought about a big subject for many years.
November 4th, 2011
Is there a global ethic?
posted by Jessica PolebaumIt snowed on Saturday throughout the American Northeast. Six weeks ahead of the official start of winter, it snowed on the hundreds of protesters camped out in lower Manhattan who have, for the past month and a half, given voice to growing popular anger over the state of our economic system.
August 15th, 2011
A struggle between faith and human action? Or, a question of apples and oranges
posted by Chika WatanabeBut then here, on another level, a question similar to that of the Christians above arises: when is human action deemed to veer away from this will of nature and the universe?
June 16th, 2011
Book review: Bridging the maximalist-minimalist divide
posted by Annie Hardison-Moody
Must human rights be grounded in a religious or metaphysical worldview in order for them to be understood and implemented globally? Or should they be developed based on broad consensus, divorced from religious grounds? These are the questions that open Grace Kao’s new book Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World. Kao situates herself between these two positions, developing a rationale for human rights that is based on her retrieval of particular elements of the most prominent methods for justifying human rights approaches.
May 3rd, 2011
CFP: “Ethics, Religion, and Civil Discourse”
posted by Grace YukichHow might schools play a role in encouraging or discouraging civil discourse across religious and political lines? The National Endowment for the Humanities announces a two-year project designed to explore these issues, housed in the Philosophy Department at Fresno State. The department has issued a call for papers for an inaugural conference for the program, which will take place October 13-15, 2011, and will be followed by an edited volume and a workshop for teachers on how to cultivate civility in an increasingly religiously diverse classroom environment.
April 1st, 2011
Implicated and enraged: An interview with Judith Butler
posted by Nathan Schneider
Judith Butler, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is among the leading social theorists alive today. Her most recent books are Frames of War (2009) and The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (2011), an SSRC volume that puts her in conversation with Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West. As we carried out our conversation by email between Brooklyn and Berkeley, uprisings were occurring across the Arab world, and a U.S.-led coalition had just begun conducting airstrikes in support of rebel forces in Libya. We had discussed some similar questions, and some different ones, a year earlier in an interview for Guernica magazine.
March 21st, 2011
Our Values
posted by Charles GelmanOur Values is a new blog published by the Michigan Institute for Social Research and featuring the writing of sociologist Wayne Baker. Its purpose is “to show that civil discussion is possible about the values and ethics that shape our lives—even when stark conflicts arise over core issues.” Each week, Baker discusses a different theme in-depth, with a special emphasis placed on reader feedback.
March 1st, 2011
When democracy alone is not enough
posted by Charles GelmanAt Patheos, philosopher Roger Gottlieb discusses why “spirituality” is a necessary supplement to democracy.
Subscribe to the RSS feed for ethics
