Professor of Religious Studies Heidi Ravven has published a paper, "What Spinoza Can Teach Us About Naturalizing Ethics," in Cognitive, Emotive, and Ethical Aspects of Decision Making in Humans and in AI, Volume IV.
In July eight members of the 27-member advisory group to Ravven's
Ford Foundation project to write a book Searching for Ethics
in a New America met in New York City to advise and confer
on the project. This was the first of several meetings of
the advisory group at the Ford Foundation which will occur periodically
over the next few years as the project develops and progresses. The aim
of the book to expose standard philosophical ethics and other academic
discussions of ethics as provincially Christian and originating and
perpetuating, in veiled form, narrowly Christian dogmatic positions.
The book will then look to wider cultural understandings of ethics, to
Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist and Navajo conceptions of ethics, that could
broaden and correct the culturally narrow presuppositions of the
standard conversations about ethics.
Also in July Ravven
attended a media workshop sponsored by the Ford Foundation for
recent foundation grantees doing projects on religion to train
them in how to present their research to a wide audience on television
and radio.
Ravven also attended a meeting of the Progressive Religion and
Values Working Group at the Ford Foundation in July. The group is
developing projects that further moderate religious voices within a
wide range of religious groups both in the US and abroad. It hopes also
to create and foster lines of communication among these groups and with
American academics.
