Sumner B. (Barney) Twiss, who died in 2023, was for ten years a General Editor of the Journal of Religious Ethics (JRE). He was a frequent contributor of articles, a member of the JRE Editorial Board, and a member of the journal's Board of Trustees. In this article, colleagues and students reflect on some of his many contributions, not only to the JRE but to the broader discursive fields of comparative religious ethics and human rights.

The filial relationship between Christian ethics and Comparative Religious Ethics (CRE) need not be perniciously distortive and can be salutary for comparative work. I suggest that the suspicions about CRE as a disguised form of a “Christian ethical enterprise” are overstated and that we can appreciate the value of the legacy of Christian ethics for comparative work in the focal themes of emancipatory criticism and common morality. Both of these themes, even if influenced by Christian ethics, reflect more universal social‐moral (...) problems that can be discerned in cross‐cultural contexts. (shrink)

Human dignity, even when analyzed through the lens of human rights, has received surprisingly little attention in the Journal of Religious Ethics, in contrast to a resurgent global interest in it. This article examines some possible reasons for this diminutive interest and makes a case for dignity's integration into the mainstream of religious ethics scholarship. A social conception of human dignity understands it as a conferment that entitles its holder to certain respectful treatments unavailable to those without it. As a (...) naturalistic conception, human dignity assumes certain features to be inherent in human nature. An emancipatory theory of dignity offers a fuller accounting of the concept as it is informed by a grassroots human rights praxis and social movements across a spectrum of historical periods and cultural and political contexts. (shrink)

Globalization is being celebrated in many circles as a distinctive achievement of our age, drawing peoples and societies more closely together and creating far greater wealth than any previous generations ever knew. While the first of these assertions is correct in the sense that societies and cultures are colliding, hitherto relatively closed horizons are opening up, and spaces and time are compressing, the second deserves critical interrogations. Using Africa's experience with globalization as a case study, this article argues that globalization (...) be understood as an emerging preference for certain institutional and policy practices that are creating and coercively imposing pervasive but avoidable conditions of material deprivations on many societies. The article defends a motivational rationale anchored in the normative vision of socio‐economic and development rights as a way to mitigate the deleterious effects of unguarded globalization. (shrink)

Globalization is being celebrated in many circles as a distinctive achievement of our age, drawing peoples and societies more closely together and creating far greater wealth than any previous generations ever knew. While the first of these assertions is correct in the sense that societies and cultures are colliding, hitherto relatively closed horizons are opening up, and spaces and time are compressing, the second deserves critical interrogations. Using Africa's experience with globalization as a case study, this article argues that globalization (...) be understood as an emerging preference for certain institutional and policy practices that are creating and coercively imposing pervasive but avoidable conditions of material deprivations on many societies. The article defends a motivational rationale anchored in the normative vision of socio-economic and development rights as a way to mitigate the deleterious effects of unguarded globalization. (shrink)

The violent encounter between Africans and the forces of globalization raises the question of whether Africans should capitulate to these forces or seek to morally transform them, notwithstanding the uncertainty of achieving success. This essay argues that an exclusively existentialist interpretation of the African predicaments is inadequate because it erects a false dichotomy between African religious and moral sensibilities. It proposes instead an ethic of responsibility that affirms the interdependence of not only these two realms of life, but also of (...) communal well-being and individual's subjectivity. (shrink)

The editors of the JRE collected short essays from scholars of religion in response to a recent incident at Hamline University that made national headlines. Last fall, Hamline University administrators refused to extend a contract to an adjunct professor of art history after a Muslim student accused her of Islamophobia for showing a 14th‐century image of Mohammad in an online class. The event provoked intense conversations about issues of academic freedom, religious diversity, the status of contingent faculty, and race. These (...) essays bring together scholarly and personal reflections about the incident at Hamline and what it means for the pedagogy of religious studies. (shrink)

Post-colonial Africa's political stability, economic growth, and human development have been impeded by a vicious circle of ethnic rivalry and civil wars. This article examines the various attempts in Africa to move beyond the traditional lens of pacifism and just war theory in curtailing the deleterious effects of war. These attempts, which are also consistent with the theoretical proposal of just peacemaking, have had mixed results on the continent. The article focuses on Liberia and Rwanda to illustrate the strengths and (...) weaknesses of just peacemaking theory, and concludes with a few suggestions on how its vision might be better pursued in Africa. (shrink)

Contemporary discourse on human rights in Africa constitutes an important and controversial aspect of the general discourse on African society and culture. I begin by examining the idea of human rights as a moral category and discuss its pertinence to African cultural and political life. I then analyze and discuss the two dominant positions in the current debate, namely, the communitarian and the individualist theses. I argue that both positions are inadequate because they dissociate dimensions of life that need to (...) be interpreted in their interplay. Drawing upon samples of traditional African religious and ethical traditions, I propose a personalist theory of human rights that affirms the intrinsic individuality and sociality of the human status. (shrink)

The late twentieth century has provided both reasons and occasions for reassessing just war theory as an organizing framework for the moral analysis of war. Books by G. Scott Davis, James T. Johnson, and John Kelsay, together with essays by Jeffrey Stout, Charles Butterworth, David Little, Bruce Lawrence, Courtney Campbell, and Tamara Sonn, signal a remarkable shift in war studies as they enlarge the cultural lens through which the interests and forces at play in political violence are identified and evaluated. (...) In his review of the contribution made by these texts, the author focuses on the cohesion of just war theory, the asymmetry between Christian and Islamic attitudes toward holy war, and the need to develop just war theory into a tool adequate to assist in the moral evaluation of violent conflicts within, not just between, nation-states. (shrink)