Description: Based upon a heritage of authoritative texts and community practices, religious and cultural communities develop distinctive answers to the crucial ethical questions of the day.  In this way, issues faced by successive generations find answers that appear uniquely legitimate, derived, on the one hand, from the community’s sacred literature and responding, on the other, to what historical and social experience has led members of the community to perceive as right. 

Taking seriously this process through which ethical systems emerge and are justified, this team-taught course has two intellectual goals: 1) to understand how and why inherited religious traditions are used to answer contemporary ethical problems and 2) to better understand the extent to which, within distinctive religious cultures, this process yields diverse ethical viewpoints. 

In the end, this study of Christian and Jewish perspectives intends to broaden our perceptions of the range of approaches possible within contemporary ethical thinking and to encourage us to evaluate the nature of and foundation for our positions on critical issues of our day.