The well‐established Blackwell series of Companions to Religion has an impressive and welcome additional member in the work under review. The series itself offers Judaism and the Hebrew Bible, the sociology of religion and post‐modern theology, Hinduism and political theology, and, directly in the area of ethics, Christian ethics and now religious ethics. Forthcoming are further companions to the study of religion, Eastern Christianity, Christian spirituality, and the Bible and culture, all eagerly anticipated. It is a versatile series, so long as librarians and scholars, teachers and students look close at what they might be getting first: level and approach and range are essential criteria to justify the financial outlay. Companion to Religious Ethics is currently available only in hardback form, although most titles in the series eventually appear in both hardback and paperback formats, making them attractive to both library/reference collections and as desk resources for individuals.
So much for the series. Turning to the work under review, Schweiker is professor of theological ethics at the University of Chicago and author of works like Responsibility and Christian Ethics (Schweiker 1995) and Power, Value and Conviction: Theological Ethics in the Postmodern Age (Schweiker 1998). He has assembled a strong contributor team consisting of some 70 scholars from around the world, among them Damien Keown, the expert on Buddhism, Roy Perrett, known for his work on Hinduism, Philip Ivanhoe on Confucianism, Robin Gill (himself the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Christian Ethics (Gill, 2001), and Jean Elshtain, known for her work on American politics and “just war”.
It is important to know just what you are getting with this work. It is not a basic introduction to “religious ethics” in the sense that it is trot through all the main world religions with concise summaries of applied ethics in them: that is only part of what this work does. Its main emphasis is historiographical and meta‐ethical, in the sense that it examines religious ethics as a process of inquiry, with complex origins, rationales, and epistemologies. Schweiker's preface notes that the companion looks at current issues in religious ethics and at the moral outlooks of the world's religions. The book does indeed do this, but highlights the hermeneutical standpoints by means of which religious ethicists look for norms, tease out connections between ethics and morality and religion, ask about the nature of the moral inquiry they are embarked on, and what factors are at work differentiating and changing specific traditions of religious ethics.
The three sections of the companion make this approach clear: the first is moral inquiry (which considers moral theories and truth, agency and practical reasoning, text and ritual, authority and norms and values, culture and pluralism); the second is moral traditions (going through Jewish and Christian, Islamic and Buddhist, Indian/Hindu and Chinese, and African ethics, probing into the distinctive origins and trajectories of each tradition); and the third is moral issues (breaking out into the implications of religious ethics in and on economics and technology, ecology and globalization, human rights and health, indigenous peoples and moral development). The spread is sure‐footed, although I can imagine some readers wanting more on gender. Other issues, like animal rights, have received ample treatment elsewhere (for example, in the work of Peter Singer). Themes can be connected through a very useful index, and a glossary provides help with cross‐cultural terminology.
Schweiker's introductory chapter on religious ethics strikes the tone of process and historiography, ontology and epistemology, by alerting readers that they are entering a work determined to map out not just the what but the why of religious ethics. His emphasis on inquiry and meta‐ethics, the hermeneutic linkages between, say, textual canon and authority and morality and on the role of religious ethicists, is captured by all other contributors in a focused and conscientious way. So the section on Jewish ethics discusses how religious ethics came to be in that tradition, what it is now, how it differs from law, and what we as religious ethicists can and should take away from such a close look. Like all sections, and chapters, support is provided from targeted up to date bibliographies, which form another strong aspect of the work. The diversity and semantics of “religious” are acknowledged as a problematic when we come to the philosophical roots of ethics in China and the cultural diversity of ethics in Africa (where Yoruba ethics come out as particularly interesting).
This is a work, then, to be used on several levels – for theologians and ethicists, the critical theory and hermeneutic historiography will be of major interest, while for practical ethics contexts the moral issues, like human rights and technology, appeal (and would be useful as support sources for courses in colleges). Ethics in the religious traditions get placed in an intellectual context, but, for teachers and students and the general reader keen to understand, for example, how and whether ethics is different because it is Buddhist, or whether ethical issues about ecology or human rights are made easier or harder to explain because they originated in an Islamic context, and for anyone looking for examples of applied ethics, others works with a focus on applying ethics will be required. The companion provides context and background to such practical needs, and that it does in a highly distinctive way. Given cross‐cultural fusion in this field, I would anticipate the need for an updated edition by 2010.
