Issue 12 of the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue
We are thrilled to announce that Issue 12 of the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue was published earlier today. We are eager to share these articles--with a variety of perspectives and exciting new scholarship--widely with our communities.
Link to homepage, with downloadable PDF to the full issue:
In this issue, we explore issues of ethics and bioethics, particularly as they are played out and reflected in our religious and faith traditions and practices. These are often the questions that keep us awake at night, or around a dinner table, or at our own desks, studying, and pondering.
What does a particular tradition’s text have to teach us about abortion, for example? What are our religious or ethical responsibilities to animals, or to the elderly, or to the dying?
As an inter-religious publication, we are also interested, of course, in comparing what different traditions might say about the same topic.
We welcome additional discourse—in letters to our editors, in our comments, and in future submissions—from you as you continue to compare, consider, and challenge understandings about ethics.
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Boston: Meeting Hatred With Love
By Charlotte Dando
It strikes me as something of a cliché to start a blog with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. but nonetheless, here I go. I was reading a book on Sunday evening which cites King as imploring, “We must meet hate with love.” This was King’s astonishing, compassionate response to the bombing of his own home. It was a strange juxtaposition to look up from my book to see the British TV news reporting events from Boston. A week after the terrible bombing of the city and the aftershock was still being felt some three thousand miles across the ocean in London. The words of King and the events of Boston are clearly two parts of the same global story on division and intolerance. The sentiment of the former offers a profound response for dealing with latter.
Let’s be clear, as a Quaker, and as a human being, I abhor violence. Terrorism is never justifiable. Yet I cannot help but be struck by many of the facts emerging about the lives of the Boston bombers; in particular, just how young they are. The surviving brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, is just nineteen years old. He is a teenager, barely old enough to have graduated high school or to vote; yet old enough to hate, old enough to want to inflict suffering on other human beings. I wonder when I look at photos of his young face, what on earth could have made him want to do it? His culture, his religion, loyalty to his brother? At times like these there always appear any number of self-designated “experts” quick to suggest the motives of terrorists. In the past ten days, so many of these “experts” have been quick to offer neat explanations of culture, religion and clan. Whilst it is nearly a decade since I was nineteen, I know that then, just as today, life is never so unambiguous. There are no simple answers to the question “Why?”
Read more here.
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