University of Notre Dame Press Value and Vulnerability: An Interfaith Dialogue on Human Dignity

Value and Vulnerability brings together scholars of many religions-including Catholicism, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Islam, and Humanism-to identify and examine conceptions and interpretations of dignity within different religious and philosophical perspectives and their applications to contemporary issues of conflict, such as gendered, religious, and racial violence, immigration, ecology, and religious peacemaking. Value and Vulnerability also includes response chapters that clarify and refine these interpretations from interfaith perspectives. Through this volume, Matthew R. Petrusek and Jonathan Rothchild offer recommendations for advancing the conversation about dignity within and among traditions and for addressing urgent global issues and threats to dignity. Together, Petrusek, Rothchild, and the contributors create a comparative framework constituted by seven questions: What sources justify dignity's existence, nature, and purpose? What is the relationship between the divine and human dignity? What is the relationship between dignity and the human body? Is dignity vulnerable or invulnerable to moral harm? Is dignity inherent or attained? Is dignity universal and equal? Is dignity practical? Through its systematic, comparative, interdisciplinary, and practical dimensions, Value and Vulnerability fills in the gaps in contemporary theological, philosophical, and ethical discourses on dignity.Contributors: Matthew R. Petrusek, Jonathan Rothchild, Darlene Fozard Weaver, Kristin Scheible, Karen B. Enriquez, Elliot N. Dorff, Daniel Nevins, Christopher Key Chapple, David P. Gushee, Aristotle Papanikolaou, Zeki Saritoprak, William Schweiker, Hille Haker, Nicholas Denysenko, Terrence L. Johnson, William O'Neill, Victor Carmona, Dawn Nothwehr, OSF, and Ellen Ott Marshall.   Review The collection is a wellspring of traditional, conceptual, practical, and innovative resources able to advance the effectiveness of dignity as the fundamental platform for vulnerably engaging in mutual recognition wherein we discover in the other what makes us capable of solidarity in the ongoing agenda of becoming more evidently human. --Theological StudiesThough often referenced in connection with legal, theological, and human rights issues, human dignity remains a vague concept at best, varying according to its interpreters. In the present collection Petrusek and Rothchild seek to clarify different beliefs and issues related to the understanding of dignity. . . . Providing an excellent analysis, this collection will be a wonderful addition to the literature on ethics, philosophy of religion, and theology and contemporary social issues. --Choice"This is an ambitious book that engages the nature and scope of dignity as a normative claim, a topic of enduring interest to religious ethics at both the theoretical and practical level." --Andrew Lustig, co-editor of Altering Nature About the Author Matthew R. Petrusek is an associate professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University. Jonathan Rothchild is a professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University. He is co-editor of Doing Justice to Mercy: Religion, Law, and Criminal Justice.