Friends and Other Strangers argues for expanding the field of religious ethics to address the normative dimensions of culture, interpersonal desires, friendships and family, and institutional and political relationships. Richard B. Miller urges religious ethicists to turn to cultural studies to broaden the range of the issues they address and to examine matters of cultural practice and cultural difference in critical and self-reflexive ways.
Friends and Other Strangers critically discusses the ethics of ethnography; ethnocentrism, relativism, and moral criticism; empathy and the ethics of self-other attunement; indignation, empathy, and solidarity; the meaning of moral responsibility in relation to children and friends; civic virtue, war, and alterity; the normative and psychological dimensions of memory; and religion and democratic public life. Miller challenges distinctions between psyche and culture, self and other, and uses the concepts of intimacy and alterity as dialectical touchstones for examining the normative dimensions of self-other relationships. A wholly contemporary, global, and interdisciplinary work, Friends and Other Strangers illuminates aspects of moral life ethicists have otherwise overlooked.
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Friends and Other Strangers
- Part I: Religion, Ethics, and the Human Sciences
- 1. What Is Religious Ethics?
- 2. On Making a Cultural Turn in Religious Ethics
- 3. Moral Authority and Moral Criticism in an Age of Ethnocentric Anxiety
- Part II: Selves and Others
- 4. The Ethics of Empathy
- 5. Indignation, Empathy, and Solidarity
- 6. On Duties and Debts to Children
- 7. Evil, Friendship, and Iconic Realism in Augustine’s Confessions
- Part III: Communities and Institutions
- 8. Just War, Civic Virtue, and Democratic Social Criticism: Augustinian Reflections
- 9. The Moral and Political Burdens of Memory
- 10. Religion, Public Reason, and the Morality of Democratic Authority
- Epilogue: Signposts of the Past and for the Future
- Notes
- Index
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