Global Religious Ethics
Religious Ethics explores fundamental moral sources and methods in Christian ethics in dialogue with the ethical understandings of at least one other religious tradition, and with special attention to Roman Catholic thought. In doing so, it explores moral issues faced by individuals and communities from theological perspectives, particularly mindful of how the economic, political and cultural structures in a religiously plural world affect those issues.
Outcomes: In this course, students will explore and compare the ethical understandings of Christianity and at least one other religious tradition; With respect to each tradition, students will learn about the foundational sources, doctrines and questions that guide its ethical thinking.
Religious Ethics explores fundamental moral sources and methods in Christian ethics in dialogue with the ethical understandings of at least one other religious tradition, and with special attention to Roman Catholic thought. In doing so, it explores moral issues faced by individuals and communities from theological perspectives, particularly mindful of how the economic, political and cultural structures in a religiously plural world affect those issues.
Outcomes: In this course, students will explore and compare the ethical understandings of Christianity and at least one other religious tradition; With respect to each tradition, students will learn about the foundational sources, doctrines and questions that guide its ethical thinking.
Ethics
Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies
This Course fulfills the required core ethics requirement of one course in ethics from either Theology or Philosophy. It also fulfills a course credit toward the Peace Studies Minor.
Course Description. Advances in technology, industry, and military weapons confront us with unprecedented new abilities for degrading significant portions of the planetary biosphere and for altering long standing climate and temperature patterns. These capacities are new and are challenging many traditional religious and ethical assumptions about humanity and our relationship to the nonhuman world. We will examine Christian and Hindu traditions on war and peacemaking during the first section of the course. We will pay particular attention to Gandhi¿s writings and agenda. We will explore the history of Western thinking on pacifism, the just war theory and also crusader war. Likewise we will attend to the rise of modern warfare with its new powerful weapons systems that give rise to new moral challenges and issues in the conduct of war. In the second section of the course we will examine the mounting impact of climate change and a range of policies that are now being put forward to reduce humanity¿s fossil fuel consumption and to ramp up solar and wind power production. We will examine Native American¿s understanding of the natural world, various streams of Christianity¿s understanding of the natural world, the philosophical and religious impact of the rise of modern science and the industrial revolution in framing the nonhuman natural world as a field of resources. We will examine philosophical debates about the moral status of animals and ecosystems and examine how Christianity and Hinduism are now responding to rising ecological concerns
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