Abstract
Comparative Religious Ethics: Everyday Decisions for Our Everyday Lives
Christine E. Gudorf
Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013. 248 pp. $49.00
Christine Gudorf, Fulbright scholar, professor, and author, here imparts her experience and expertise in ethical reflection to case-study analyses across the landscape of religious traditions. Gudorf builds on the pedagogy of case narratives to uncover through the lens of faith and secular traditions the human desire to know what is right and to act accordingly. Gudorf invites a twenty-first century generation of students—religious and not religious, comfortable with friends and classmates affiliated with diverse faith traditions and those without, familiar with complicated personal and social contexts—to consider religions’ quest to instill right teaching (orthodoxy) and right practice (orthopraxy) in the determinations of the quotidian events of everyone’s lives.
Gudorf writes for “the seeker-skeptical students of Religious Studies who know that there is something valuable to be found in the study of religion, however reluctant they may be to sign on to any one existing religion” (11). She cautions the reader not to expect a comparison of worldviews, metaphysics, or spiritual leaders, but to find the values, meanings, and interpretations of thinking in religion that have long well served humankind regarding the ways of negotiating life.
Illuminating the status that contemporary Western culture accords religion, Gudorf introduces the text with the pragmatic claims of students and their peers now coming of age, claims that eschew organized religion over something like a spiritual life and claims that tolerate others’ adherence to religious practices and beliefs. This introduction may inspire students to question some of these claims. Faculty teaching other disciplines and parents might also find the introduction helpful in recognizing the cultural relativisms with which students are often occupied. Gudorf lays the contexts of students’ concerns with bias, untoward religious divisiveness, religion-based violence, sanctimonious holiness, and/or duplicity at a postmodern doorstep without giving in to the conclusions that religious traditions have no place in secularized contexts. Rather, she offers reasons to appreciate the practical wisdom of ancient and new religious traditions.
Appealing to the student seeker-skeptic, in chapter 1 Gudorf outlines the fundamental contours of ethics and spirituality in religion. She describes—briefly, since she “practices” different approaches in the examples of chapters 2 through 8—virtue ethics, deontological or rule-based ethics (and variants in religious, casuist, and secular applications), and teleological or consequentialist ethics. The basics explained, she then examines the material of contexts that bears critical importance for subsequent chapters’ case studies to be parsed: rethinking traditional norms, for example, on sexuality, plagiarism, lying and truth-telling; examining character, the determination of what is “the good,” and who gets to decide; and finally, surveying how social and empirical sciences inform today’s ethical analysis.
An innovative and welcome contribution lies in the ordinariness of cases considered and the survey of religions on the subjects. Each chapter presents an issue (such as food, labor, sex), a case, discussion questions, further reading, and suggested films to support learning; the text includes a glossary. For example, in chapter 6 Gudorf depicts religious tradition’s thinking on family configurations from pre-industrial to modern and postmodern contexts, recognizing perennial realities of single-parent homes and extended families, and the newer expressions of older children raising younger siblings, great distances between family members, and the loss of a cottage/farm economy to work outside the home. This loss in particular has impacted the socialization and training that parents once exercised over their children, reducing their oversight and authority, and compromising family traditions and identities. She concludes: “Today the only relationships that tie families together are those of affection. If there is no affection, there is no tie” (160). This case illustrates those ties with a conflict regarding a couple’s decision to spend Thanksgiving weekend with parents three hours away or in their own home with friends on a rare visit from Central America. Discussion questions reinforce the chapter’s substantive expressions of ethical values and the meanings that religious traditions have attached to families and kinship for consideration by students and the religious studies, theology, philosophy, and/or ethics teacher. This method provides students with sufficient exposure to religious and secular conclusions about the values at stake even in ordinary affairs. Comparative Religious Ethics is recommended for introductory courses in comparative religions, religious ethics, and adult roundtable programs.