Sharing Values: A Hermeneutic for Global Ethics

The book Ariane Hentsch Cisneros and I have been editing for a good part of 2010 has at last seen the light of day!

The work on this project began with a consultation in Nairobi, Kenya in January 2009 on Sharing Values with scholars and practitioners gathered to struggle with a variety of questions related to contemporary issues of global ethics. The authors in this book are among the top scholars in the field. The articles convey their grappling with some of the more difficult issues of global ethics today.

Here’s blurb from the back cover of the book.

As global ethics emerges as an important answer to the common issues facing humankind, we cannot spare a reflection on the process leading to a consensus on global values. If we are to break political, economic, ideological, cultural, religious and gender-based patterns of domination in the debate on global ethics, we must ensure that all parties to the dialogue are able to express their values freely and in their own fashion. This book provides indications of the current reflection on
the hermeneutics of intercultural and interreligious dialogue on ethics, with an attempt to formulate in a decentralised manner priorities for future implementation of this dialogue. These include using our own religious resources to foster a dialogue on ethics, searching in the transcendental or the holistic for a solution to moral diversity, dealing with the deep suffering caused by colonisation and neo-imperialism, and addressing the mutual challenges of traditionalism and modernism. Also presented are the “Globethics.net Principles on Sharing Values across Cultures and Religions”.

Best of all, the book is available for a free download at www.globethics.net.

About Shanta Premawardhana

Rev. Dr. Shanta Premawardhana was recently appointed President of the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education in Chicago. A Baptist pastor from Sri Lanka, he was most recently the director for the Program Interreligious Dialogue and Cooperation at the World Council of Churches (WCC), a worldwide fellowship of 349 Protestant and Orthodox churches based in Geneva, Switzerland. Prior to moving to Geneva, Premawardhana served as the Associate General Secretary for Interfaith Relations at the National Council of Churches of Christ, based in New York. Following seminary education in Sri Lanka and India, Premawardhana arrived in the United States in 1981 for graduate study at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he earned his M.A. and Ph.D, in Religion. Continuing to live in the Chicago area, he founded the Chicago Ashram of Jesus Christ, a Christian community with an outreach to South Asian immigrants from many cultural backgrounds and religious traditions and served for fourteen years as senior pastor of Ellis Avenue Church located in the south side of Chicago.
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