(Download) "Moving Forward by Agreeing to Disagree: A Response to "Healing Ecology" (Essay)" by Journal of Buddhist Ethics ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Moving Forward by Agreeing to Disagree: A Response to "Healing Ecology" (Essay)
- Author : Journal of Buddhist Ethics
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 189 KB
Description
David Loy has described himself here as male, Caucasian, and a U.S. citizen. We also know from his public profile that he is, among other descriptors, a Buddhist who has been authorized to teach Zen Buddhism by Master Yamada Koun Roshi of the Sanbo Kyodan lineage of Zen. Since portions of what I have to say emerge from reflecting on some differences between our social location, allow me to provide a few identifying markers of my own. I, too, am a U.S. citizen: a second-generation Taiwanese American female. Like Loy I was raised Christian and teach philosophical and religious ethics, but unlike him I never left Christianity (McFarlane and Loy). I identify today as a progressive Christian with denominational membership in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and have never been a practitioner of, or academic specialist in, any variety of Buddhism. I will accordingly put aside otherwise valid questions of what kind of Buddhist soteriology has Loy presented and whether Buddhists should apply concepts such as dukkha and anatta in the ecological directions that he recommends. I will instead engage his paper through three conceptual lenses with which I am more familiar--Christian, feminist, and what might be called Maritainian or Rawlsian. Perhaps the first question that came to my mind after reading Loy's paper is how someone like me should even craft a response, particularly since my religious tradition (for reasons of cultural hegemony) has generally been the one to set the terms of discussion on environmentalism and related matters (for example, various "religion and science" debates). Another way of asking this question is whether I ought to engage the conceptual and metaphysical questions that his paper raises or the practical and political ones. There is a respectable tradition in political philosophy that would encourage me to select the latter option, so as to allow people of diverse and even mutually incompatible final commitments to pursue common projects in the absence of agreement about underlying theory. For example, prior to the mid-twentieth century adoption by the United Nations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UNESCO convened a committee to study the feasibility of putting together a charter of rights for all peoples and nations. One of the most active members of that committee, the French Catholic natural law theorist Jacques Maritain, famously remarked that everyone--even delegates with "violently opposed ideologies"--could agree upon a list of rights, but "only on condition that no one asks us why" (Maritain, Human Rights 9). (2) Maritain himself was "quite certain that [his] way of justifying belief in the rights of man and the ideal of liberty, equality, fraternity [wa]s the only way with a firm foundation in truth." Still, the strength of his conviction "[did] not prevent [him] from being in agreement on these practical convictions with people who [we]re certain that their way of justifying them, entirely different..or opposed to [his] ... [wa]s equally the only way founded upon truth" (10-11).
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