Book Review: Sumner B. Twiss and Bruce Grelle (eds.), Explorations in Global Ethics: Comparative Religious Ethics and Interreligious Dialogue (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000, 350 pp., no price given hbk.)
| Date | 01 December 2000 |
| Author | Oliver Ramsbotham |
| DOI | 10.1177/03058298000290030812 |
| Published date | 01 December 2000 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Millennium
918
Thus, two thrusts of t he book stand out for recogni tion: that the la ying of moral
claims in an d by itself is worth t aking seriously and th at our search for the
groundin g of such claims should be cross-cult ural. Both re quire a word o f
explanatio n. A pre occupation wit h political realities le ads one to ove rlook moral
suasion as a force in and of itself, desp ite the fact that i t appeals to a dimension of
human li fe which all human beings share , for all h uman beings posses s a sense of
right and wrong. T he seco nd po int addresses the complicati on that although all
human beings possess a sense of right and wrong , all of them do not posse ss the
same se nse of rig ht and wron g. Thus any move toward s the similar ideas of right
and wrong requi red to sustain a global co mmunity will not fall like manna from
heaven on all alike, they will have to be arrived at through dialogue, that is to say,
by taking differenc es seriously.
ARVIND SHARMA
Arvind Sharma is Birks Professor o f Comparative Religion at McGill Unive rsity,
and Visiting Professor of Indic S tudies at Harvard University
Sumner B. Twiss a nd Bruce Grelle (eds. ), Explorations in Global Ethics:
Comparative Religious Ethics and Interreligious Dialogue (Bo ulder, CO:
Westview, 2000, 350 pp., no price given hbk.).
The centra l aim of this book is to relate the ac ademic study of comparat ive
religious ethics to the more pragmatic enterprise of int erreligious dialogue. It asks
two main questi ons. First, can the discourses o f comparativ e religious e thics and
interreligio us dialogue in general mutually enrich each o ther, for exa mple, via the
opening up of new agendas for the former and new crit ical methodolo gies for the
latter? And, seco nd, can traditions of scholarl y analysis of this k ind usefully inform
the de velopment and e ffectivenes s of a Glo bal Ethic suc h as that proposed by the
1993 Parlia ment of th e World’s Religion s? These are ev idently vital issues and the
book does an important service in opening up such a rich fiel d of
theoretical /practical enquiry.
Part one of th e book addresses the first question. Here there a re strong
contributi ons from the two editors and from Kate M cCarthy and Sallie King, with a
concludi ng commenta ry by Marcus Braybrooke. Twiss compares four curricular
paradigms in the tea ching of c omparative religious ethics, finally coming do wn in
favour of a hermeneutical-dialogic approach which seeks to give equal weight to
ourselves and others in the search for unde rstanding withi n a context of cultura l
pluralism and relig ious difference. This is an important co nclusion, pointi ng as i t
does, towards the notoriously di fficult en terprise of constructing a common moral
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