This essay explores the intersections of religious ethics and American religious history and advocates for a transdisciplinary approach to scholarship in both disciplines. Four books, each published within the last 4 years, form the foundation of this discussion by modeling distinctive elements of transdisciplinary scholarship: Heathen: Religion and Race in American History by Kathryn Gin Lum; Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism by Peter Coviello; Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts Against Domestic Violence by Juliane Hammer; (...) and The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics by Janet R. Jakobsen. Each of these texts raises questions that hover at the intersections of religious ethics and American religious history, demonstrating how scholarship in both areas can be strengthened through a destabilization of the disciplines themselves. (shrink)

Theoretical and methodological discussions of ethnography and ethics have appeared regularly in the Journal of Religious Ethics for at least the past 13 years. Many of these conversations have been preoccupied by the relationship between “normative” work in religious ethics and “descriptive” work on moral worlds and patterns of reasoning. However, there has often been a perceived impasse when it comes to drawing “normative” ethical arguments from fine-grained ethnographic study. This paper begins by assessing significant contributions to religious ethics made (...) by ethnographers of Islam, focusing on the way they render a stark descriptive/normative binary irrelevant. I then turn to an example from my own fieldwork that expands our understanding of the relationship between ethnography and ethics. Through this example, I argue that ethical thinkers working outside the academy—theologians, activists, and cultural producers—also draw on an “ethnographic imagination” to make moral arguments. I end by reflecting on how the “ethnographic imagination” situates religious ethics as part of broader humanistic inquiry, showing that careful accounts of how people do live are always enmeshed with visions of how we should live. (shrink)

As postcolonial approaches in the studies of religion have challenged liberal-secular presuppositions in addressing non-Western forms of life, there has been a growing concern to examine the normative presuppositions of postcolonial approaches in the field of religious ethics. This paper addresses how Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, and Homi Bhabha show their normative concerns for addressing the interstitial existence of ethnic-religious minorities, negoriating between their subaltern religions and the inclusive-but-exclusive potential of the liberal secular frame of integration. These thinkers raise normative (...) critiques of the spatiotemporal and moral frameworks of liberal, secular integration while suggesting thgeir own normative visions for transforming the existing form of liberal secular democracy. They reveal different models in their normative critiques and visions: Taylor suggests a postsecular and dialogical model, while Asad sets forth an antisecular traditionalist model and Bhabha a pro-secular and vernacular one. (shrink)