Discourses on environmental ethics in Buddhism and Christianity

In this interdisciplinary and interreligious seminar, we want to look at fundamental questions of environmental ethics from a Christian and Buddhist perspective. One focus of the comparative analysis will be the question of how certain ethical concepts and norms of behaviour are derived from religious world views. This will not only touch on environmental ethical problems in the narrow sense, as these are always based on fundamental attitudes. These include anthropologies, the understanding of nature and the fundamental attitude towards a responsible lifestyle. Even if these aspects cannot be fully examined within the seminar, dealing with them should sensitise us to the various prerequisites of environmental ethical judgements. Therefore, within the seminar we will deal with a section of the wealth of different currents of the two religions, namely Christianity from a Protestant theological perspective and Buddhism in the form of Mahayana. It will be interesting to see whether and how representatives of both religious movements react to each other's concepts. At the end of the semester, students will not only have expanded their knowledge of Christian and Buddhist ideas in the field of environmental ethics, but will also have acquired tools with which they can identify religiously based propositions of environmental ethics as such and derive environmental ethical implications from religious scriptures.

–This seminar will be held in German–

(Machine translation.)