{"title":"Rebirth and Perfection in Ordinary Lives: Biographical Writing and Vernacular Religious Ethics in Twentieth-Century Myanmar","authors":"M. K. Long","doi":"10.1111/jore.70020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jore.70020","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This article investigates stories of rebirth and ascriptions of pāramī, ethical perfection, in a 1982 biography of the Buddhist nun Daw Gunawati (1890-1991) of Khemethaka nunnery in Sagaing Hills, Myanmar. In this and other contemporary biographical narratives, the cosmic timescale of Buddhist ethical cultivation protects and authorizes girls and women who wish to circumvent social expectations of marriage in order to initiate as nuns. In conversation with Leela Prasad's concept of “ethical resonance,” I examine pāramī as an idiom of Buddhist authority through which women reconstruct family relationships and reimagine monastic belonging. I propose new interpretive strategies that center vernacular theorists and affective registers of personal encounter in the study of Buddhist ethics, with further implications for the inclusion of vernacular, non-canonical textuality in studies of religious ethics.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":"54 2","pages":"127-152"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2026-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148079771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Natural Liberty and Slavery in Suárez","authors":"Toni Alimi","doi":"10.1111/jore.70016","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.70016","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Francisco Suárez is typically understood as having believed that all humans are capable of self-rule by virtue of their human nature. I argue that that standard interpretation is mistaken. Unlike most of his predecessors, Suárez understood natural slavery as the absence of a right, not the absence of a capacity. He denied that there are any natural slaves in this revised sense. Suárez's understanding of liberty as a right explains many of his other commitments concerning slavery. He broke radically from the Aristotelian tradition, not in denying that some people are incapable of self-rule but in denying that this incapacity could legitimate enslaving such people.</p>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":"54 1","pages":"6-25"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jore.70016","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147708221","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Of Carcasses and Christ: Rereading the Repugnant Ecological Other","authors":"Colin B. Weaver","doi":"10.1111/jore.70014","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.70014","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay claims that a collection of hunting and fishing devotionals provincializes a common trope in environmental literatures: the figure of the repugnantly anti-ecological conservative Protestant. A close reading of these texts reveals their authors’ and ideal audiences’ extensive knowledge of land and animal minds, which deflates their construal as unconcerned with or antipathic toward the nonhuman. Moreover, these texts are works of practical ethics that conceive of hunting as a norm-constituted activity involving complex forms of valuing nonhuman animals. These values come out in how the authors describe risking human relations and submitting their bodies to the elements to do right by animals. The authors also express their multispecies axiology through curious arts of tying the slaying and field-dressing of game to the crucifixion. I suggest that these features should evoke for progressive environmentalists a sense of the uncanny.</p>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":"54 1","pages":"76-99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jore.70014","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147708308","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Natural Law, the Obligation to Work, and the Limits of Contributive Justice in Aquinas and Bonaventure","authors":"Daniel Schwartz","doi":"10.1111/jore.70017","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.70017","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This article examines the moral obligation to work in the thought of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, focusing on their responses to critiques of Mendicant poverty in thirteenth-century Paris. It explores their natural law arguments for manual labor as a collective duty rooted in self-preservation and human physiology—particularly the significance of hands. Both thinkers affirm occupational diversification based on natural inclination and social utility, thereby rejecting a universal duty to work. While spiritual labor justifies friars' exemption from manual work, Aquinas and Bonaventure also defend the legitimacy of contemplation (<i>otium</i>) as exempting friars even from spiritual labor. This article argues that such an exemption reflects a broader critique of societies that prioritize productivity and utility over non-instrumental values. It concludes that full contributive justice may risk suppressing non-productive activity.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":"54 1","pages":"58-75"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147708135","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Divine and Human Love: Religious Foundations of Mo Zi's Universal Love and Christian Agape","authors":"Song Liu, Chengjia Li","doi":"10.1111/jore.70015","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.70015","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This study examines the theological foundations and ethical implications of Mo Zi's concept of “universal love” (<i>jian ai</i>) and Christian “agape,” exploring their religious dimensions, ontological bases, and contemporary significance. While existing scholarship has often emphasized the ethical similarities between these two traditions, this research provides a more nuanced theological analysis that reveals their distinctive religious foundations. Through systematic examination of Mohist writings and New Testament sources, particularly the Gospels and Johannine literature, this study demonstrates that these love concepts emerge from fundamentally different religious worldviews: Mo Zi's universal love flows from Heaven's impartial concern for human welfare and seeks sociopolitical harmony, while Christian agape emerges from God's self-giving nature and aims at divine-human communion. Despite these theological differences, both traditions establish love as a religious imperative with radical implications for social ethics, transcending conventional boundaries of moral concern. This comparative theological analysis offers resources for contemporary interreligious dialogue and cross-cultural ethical engagement, suggesting how these complementary religious visions might address shared global challenges while respecting their distinctive spiritual foundations.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":"54 1","pages":"26-57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147708290","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Incoherent Subject: Piety and Dissonance in Ultra-Orthodox Women’s Prayer Rituals","authors":"Nechama Juni","doi":"10.1111/jore.70007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jore.70007","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Predominant theories of subject formation have focused on the ways that people challenge and subvert the norms they live within or how they inhabit and consolidate those norms. This article shows how these accounts and their theoretical inheritors have directed scholarly attention toward the ways that subjects work to achieve coherence with their norms—either by subverting those norms (Judith Butler) or inhabiting them (Saba Mahmood)—thereby obscuring forms of subjectivity in which such coherence is impossible. Through ethnographic research and discourse analysis of a popular women’s prayer book alongside analysis of Jewish legal texts, this article conducts a case study of contemporary American Ultra-Orthodox women’s prayer practices, demonstrating how the pious woman is caught between two totalizing and incompatible discourses of piety. She cannot achieve coherence with the norms that guide and discipline her, nor can she subvert them. This analysis thereby brings to light an under-theorized form of religious subjectivity: the incoherent subject.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":"53 3","pages":"343-364"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2025-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145555713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Émile Ackermann’s Let Us Not Forget Who We Are: Reflections on Visible Minorities","authors":"Deborah Achtenberg","doi":"10.1111/jore.70008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jore.70008","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Ackermann argues that recent changes in French <i>laïcité,</i> such as the law that prohibits wearing conspicuous religious symbols, although introduced to preserve national unity, actually destroy such unity and split in two the lives of those who wear the symbols. Visible religious expression, he argues, can indicate a desire to connect while the privatization of religion is characteristic of fundamentalism. He uses examples from Jewish sacred writings, the lives of important figures, and his family to direct his arguments to Jewish religious fundamentalists. To critical theorists of secularism, he argues that laic France does not separate state and religion but produces a type of religion, one that can only flourish in private; for example, a type of Judaism more like Christianity in its separation of inside and outside, subjectivity and world. He draws on Emmanuel Levinas’s view that subjectivity is not private but fundamentally in relation to others, joining scholars Catherine Chalier, Delphine Horvilleur, and Rachid Benzine, who have used the thought of Derrida, Levinas, and other theorists to argue against fundamentalism, and whose Levinasian–Derridian understanding of subjectivity can be seen to overcome Talal Asad’s concern that secularism is tied to neo-Stoic distancing from religious beliefs and passions.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":"53 3","pages":"394-407"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145555635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Augustine’s Political Idealism","authors":"Gregory W. Lee","doi":"10.1111/jore.70006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jore.70006","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This article challenges Reinhold Niebuhr’s depiction of Augustine as a political realist. Although Augustine was a realist concerning the forces that shape political life, he was an idealist in his social ethics. He considered the Sermon on the Mount relevant for political action, and he thought the same principles should govern Christians in both private and public life. To defend this interpretation, I analyze Augustine’s treatments of war, capital punishment, and torture. I then contrast his ethics with two kingdoms theology and the theory of dirty hands. A final section analyzes his understanding of role-specific responsibilities. As I argue, Augustine does not offer a general approbation of harsh practices; he endorses benevolent severity, according to which external harshness can express internal love.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":"53 3","pages":"365-393"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145555741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lived Experiences of Saṃvega: The Free Funeral Service Movement and the Ethical Dimensions of Encounters with Suffering in Contemporary Myanmar","authors":"Mu-Lung Hsu","doi":"10.1111/jore.70005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jore.70005","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p><i>Saṃvega</i>, a moralized emotional state that embodies the Buddha’s teachings on suffering, initiates the beginning of a person’s ethical self-transformation. While existing scholarship focuses on the scripturally prescribed role of <i>saṃvega</i> in deepening aversion to the world and the desire for enlightenment, this textualist perspective overlooks its localized interpretations and lived experiences. This article explores how popular understandings of <i>saṃvega</i> are intertwined with ethical concerns related to everyday life in Myanmar, extending beyond renunciatory impulses to include remorse for unwholesome deeds and empathy for others’ suffering. Focusing on Myanmar’s Free Funeral Service Movement, this article shows how Burmese Buddhists transform encounters with death into opportunities to cultivate these ethical sensibilities. This article contributes to Theravāda studies by demonstrating how embodied moral emotions, like <i>saṃvega</i>, bridge textual traditions and lived religious practices. It also highlights the centrality of an ethnographic approach in understanding Buddhist everyday ethics.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":"53 3","pages":"306-342"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2025-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145555696","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Augustine, AI, and the Two Models of Language","authors":"Kevin Jung","doi":"10.1111/jore.70004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jore.70004","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article explores the two models of language articulated by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Augustine. It examines first, the central roles of language in humans and intelligent machines, and second, the implications of these models for understanding what it means to be human, as well as the promises and limits of AI systems. The strength of the Wittgensteinian model is particularly evident in how AI systems emulate certain types of inferential reasoning in humans by identifying the semantic roles of words in language games. By contrast, the strength of the Augustinian model is most apparent in highlighting the limits of AI systems, particularly their struggle to simulate human intelligence beyond computational reasoning, which is largely trained on big data and relies on rule-based inference to generate solutions. The Augustinian model, in particular, discloses the complexities of human cognition that extend beyond linguistic abilities, emphasizing the role of higher-order volition and understanding in communication.</p>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":"53 2","pages":"217-238"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jore.70004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144905523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}