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This course considers, in a theoretically informed way, some of the issues that arise in thinking about religious ethics comparatively. We focus on exemplars or “holy” people: figures who refract the values held to be important by a wider community or society. The course starts by setting up transcendent and immanent frames in the study of religion. We then read biographies of the “holy,” pointing out what can be seen through the two frames together. Biographical subjects include exemplary Confucian women from the 1st c. BCE; Buddhist nuns and monks from the 4-6th c. CE; and a 19th-c. biography by Henry David Thoreau of Captain John Brown, read alongside testimonies by Harriet Tubman and W.E.B. Du Bois.