June 2024 Blog

A New ISSR Research Grant from TWCF Fraser Watts   ISSR has received a large grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF 2023-32537) as part of the TWCF initiative on The Science of Religious and Spiritual Exercises (SORSE). Religious and spiritual traditions contain repositories of ancient practical wisdom about how to live well, and they often prescribe practices that help people to foster deeper connections with themselves, with other people, with the world around them, and with the transcendent.    Such practices are often recommended simply because they are proper, rather than because of their effects, but there is increasing evidence that religious and spiritual exercises have considerable well-being benefits. The overall SORSE program has three main objectives: Focus on expanding our understanding of the science of

By |2024-06-15T18:52:35+01:00June 15th, 2024|Categories: Blog|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

The Contribution of Religion to Ethics by Michael J. Reiss

How should we decide what is morally right and what is morally wrong? For much of human history, the teachings of religion were presumed to be a large part of the answer. Over time, two developments challenged this. The first was the establishment of the discipline of moral philosophy. Foundational texts, such as Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and the growth of coherent, non-religious approaches to ethics, notably utilitarianism, served to marginalise the role of religion. And then the twentieth century saw the rapid growth of evolutionary biology with an enthusiastic presumption that biology was the source of ethics. What space do such developments leave for religion in ethics?   One can be most confident about the validity and worth of an ethical conclusion if three

By |2019-05-03T19:11:38+01:00May 3rd, 2019|Categories: Blog|Tags: , , |

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