Religious Consultation Report

Table of Contents

Page One: Population and Ecology Issues Crucial for Survival in the 21st Century
Article 2: Religious Consultation News
Article 3: Scholars Analyze Sexuality in Teen Magazines
Article 4: Report Says Catholic Hospital Mergers Threaten Family Planning, Abortion Services
Article 5: Guide to U.N. Treaties on Women's Rights Available
Article 6: A Perspective on the Growing Force of "Engaged Buddhism"
Article 7: Looking at the Sun: Confronting the Glaring Eco-Crisis
Article 8: Movers and Shakers: Tracking the Activities of Our Participating Scholars

Page One

Population and Ecology Issues
Crucial for Survival in the 21st Century

As we approach the millennium, the vexing problems of population growth, ecological degradation and sustainability are being brought into sharp focus.

The United Nations Population Fund is calling on governments and organizations worldwide to observe June 16, 1999 as "The Day of Six Billion." It is the day when world population is expected to reach six billion, twice the number of humans who existed in 1960.

Contrary to some media reports suggesting that population growth is decreasing and posing less of a challenge to the earth's limited resources, the UNFPA says that world population "will continue to grow substantially for at least another 50 years." In the year 2050, world population is expected to be at least 9.4 billion. This continued growth is due to the large cohort of young people currently entering its prime childbearing years. In addition, social and medical advances have contributed to an unprecedented increase in the proportion of people over age 65. Without immediate implementation of creative solutions, this increased population will strain the social and economic resources of nations and further impinge on the already shrinking natural environment.

The Worldwatch Institute reports that "Almost half of the forests that once blanketed earth -- 3 billion hectares -- are gone." Between 1980 and 1995 alone, almost 200 million hectares of forest were destroyed, an area three times the size of the state of Texas. Since mid-century, humans have tripled their use of water, and water tables are falling on every continent. By 2025, shortages of freshwater supplies are expected to severely impact almost 3 billion people in 48 countries. Meanwhile, mammals, fish, birds, amphibians and reptiles are all suffering high rates of decline due to the destruction of habitat, excessive hunting and fishing and other human encroachments.

The human race is clearly at a crossroads: either we reduce our rates of reproduction and consumption or destroy the natural environment and ourselves in the process.

In 1994, the world community took an important step in addressing the population crisis with the historic International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, sponsored by the United Nations. The Program of Action that emerged from the conference called for a comprehensive course of action aimed at achieving the universal availability of family planning education and services by the year 2015.

The Program of Action was revolutionary in that it tied the stabilization of population to expanded education and equality for women, the elimination of poverty, sustainable patterns of development, and environmental integrity. It eschewed top-down solutions, calling instead for action from the grass roots and a partnership between governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to attain the necessary ends.

Government agencies and NGOs dedicated to the goals of the Program of Action have been engaged in a review process, formally called "ICPD + 5," to determine what progress has been made since the Cairo conference. A series of international roundtables has been been held in the past year focusing on critical aspects of the Program. These culminate in an International Forum in The Hague, February 8-12, 1999. The results of the Hague Forum will be reviewed by the U. N. Commission on Population and Development the following month. These deliberations will, in turn, contribute to the Special Session of the U.N. General Assembly next June.

The Religious Consultation on Population, Reproductive Health and Ethics was established at the time of the Cairo conference in 1994. Religious scholars and activists on the liberal wings of their various traditions felt compelled to assert progressive religious viewpoints on the many contentious issues related to population, knowing all too well that the voices of religious fundamentalism have often been the loudest.

Almost five years later, the Religious Consultation has attracted hundreds of scholars and activists committed to its mission. They participated at Cairo and at subsequent U.N. conferences. They have also helped launch innovative projects whose findings contribute mightily to the ongoing debates. This newsletter includes updates on each of the Consultation's projects and publications as well as information on the important work of our scholars. We welcome your feedback.

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Religious Consultation News

SUNY Press Publishes "Ethics for a Small Planet"

Ethics for a Small Planet: New Horizons on Population, Consumption and Ecology by Daniel C. Maguire and Larry Rasmussen, with an introduction by Rosemary Radford Ruether, was published earlier this year by the State University of New York Press. Both men are deeply involved with the Religious Consultation on Population, Reproductive Health and Ethics.

The topic of Ethics is the suffering of this planet and its people. The underlying theme is male power, specifically white and Western male power. Men in those economies are once again exercising their traditional and seemingly universal genius for monarchical power, even in countries that are supposedly democratic. In his part of the book, Maguire, who teaches at Marquette, notes that maleness is wealth in a sexist world, unjust wealth. Until its counterfeit nature is discovered, especially by those who have profited from it, a revolutionary job waits to be done and the earth will continue to die.

Maguire states that Lynn White in his renowned article "The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," did not go far enough when he indicted the Jewish and Christian bibles for their anthropocentric mandate to "fill the earth and master it." The attitude this fosters, White said, spawned Western society's "ruthlessness toward nature." Maguire argues that White is not so much wrong as incomplete in his indictment. The central dogmas of Christianity also need critical attention as to their ecological impact, and Maguire undertakes that kind of critique. He also looks at the real progress the human family made at the 1994 United Nations Conference on Population and Development, progress that is imperiled by right-wing obstructionism and consumerist binging as we approach the millennium.

Rasmussen, Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, takes a different but complementary approach to the causes of social and environmental degradation. He offers an historical account of the male-led and dominant European and "neo-European" forces that have led to our present preoccupation with issues of sustainability, population, and development.

Both Maguire and Rasmussen work in this volume toward a moral framework that is infused with a sense of the sacred as the nucleus of the good and is at the same time realistic about the play of human power in the world. The book closes with a stipulation of moral norms required for a sustainable earth community and examples of actions in keeping with them.

"Good Sex" on Tap at Annual AAR Conference

The first public report of the Religious Consultation project "Good Sex: Women's Religious Wisdom on Sexuality" will take place Monday, November 23 at the American Academy of Religion's annual conference in Orlando, Florida. The panel is scheduled from 1:00 to 3:30pm at the Walt Disney Dolphin Hotel.

In the "Good Sex" project, an interdisciplinary, interreligious team of feminist scholars is exploring the positive dimensions of women's sexuality, especially pleasure, as found in a variety of the world's religions. The AAR panel will include conclusions reached by individual scholars and focus on the process of engaging in scholarship that is intentionally interactive and shaped by the group in an increasingly globalized context. "Good Sex" as a matter of public policy is an important application of this research. Panelists will speak about plans for using their individual and the collective work in international forums like the United Nations, as well as in grassroots programs.

Panelists for the AAR event include: Rebecca Alpert of Temple University; Wanda Deifelt of Escola Superior de Teologia in Sao Leopoldo, Brasil; Mary E. Hunt of the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual; Grace Jantzen of the University of Manchester in England; and Suwanna Satha-Anand of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. Patricia Beattie Jung of Loyola University-Chicago will preside. Radhika Balakrishnan of Marymount Manhattan College will be the respondent.

Participants in the "Good Sex" project attended a final meeting in Amsterdam in July and are currently preparing their essays for publication in a scholarly volume.

Noted Scholar Ze'ev Falk Dies

The noted Jewish scholar Ze'ev W. Falk, who had been working with colleagues at the Religious Consultation in the "Men's Obligations to Women" project, passed away on September 19, 1998 one month after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. Rabbi Falk was a resident of Jerusalem. He recently served as Rector (Provost) of the Seminary of Judaic Studies and was on the Faculty of Law at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

"Ze'ev was a remarkable human being, a model of rectitude, combining devout religious observance, profound spirituality, compassion and tolerance with scrupulous scholarship," said his friend, Alice Shalvi of the Israeli Women's Network. "We shall miss his wise counsel."

"If I feel such pain at the passing of Ze'ev after meeting and working with him only over the past two years, I can imagine the grief of his dear wife, Miriam, and his friends," Dan Maguire, president of the Religious Consultation, commented. "Ze'ev combined in a single person the particular and the universal. His Jewish faith was the centerpiece of his gentle life but he was welcoming to the beauty and strengths of all the world religions."

"We were all touched by his intellectual vitality, humility, compassion and his readiness to embrace new ideas and perspectives," said Anantanand Rambachan, a Hindu scholar with the Consultation's men's project. "We will miss him in any future deliberations."

Asghar Ali Engineer of the Institute for Islamic Studies in New Delhi, who also worked with Rabbi Falk on the Consultation's men's project, expressed shock at his colleague's death: "It is difficult to believe that he is no more. I feel he is even now talking to me. He was a great scholar and a pious man, and so humble. May his soul rest in peace. It is a great loss indeed."

Participants in the "Men's Obligations to Women" project are finishing the final drafts of their papers, preparing them for publication in a scholarly and then a popular volume. The scholarly volume will be dedicated to Ze'ev Falk. The men's group will remain together as a Task Force of the Religious Consultation to present their views to journalists and policymakers and to speak out in the ongoing debates over women's rights.

"Visions of a New Earth" Soon to be Published

The State University of New York Press is soon to publish the results of the Religious Consultation's first project, which was called "New Theology on Population, Consumption and Ecology." The volume, Visions of a New Earth: Religious Perspectives on Population, Consumption and Ecology, will include essays by distinguished scholars representing a variety of faith traditions.

Among the essays in Visions of a New Earth are: "The Religion of the Market" by David R. Loy, a Buddhist scholar at Bunkyo University in Japan; "Sustainability and the Global Economy" by David C. Korten of the People-Centered Development Forum; "Self as Individual and Collective: Ethical Implications" by Harold Coward of the University of Victoria in British Columbia; "New Theology on Population, Ecology and Overconsumption from the Catholic Perspective" by Alberto Múnera of the Fundacion Social in Bogota, Colombia; "The Lost Fragrance: Protestantism and the Nature of What Matters" by Catherine Keller of Drew University; and "The Promises of Exiles: A Jewish Theology of Responsibility" by Laurie Zoloth-Dorfman of the San Francisco State University.

Also included are "'One Tree is Equal to Ten Sons': Some Hindu Responses to the Problems of Ecology, Population and Consumerism" by Vasudha Narayanan of the University of Florida - Gainesville; "An Islamic Response to the Manifest Ecological Crisis: Issues of Justice" by Nawal H. Ammar of Kent State University; "Toward a Buddhist Environmental Ethic" by Rita M. Gross of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire; "Chinese Religions on Population, Consumption and Ecology" by Chun-fang Yu of Rutgers University; and "African Religions and the Global Issue of Population, Consumption and Ecology" by Jacob K. Olupona of the University of California-Davis.

The book's introduction is written by Daniel C. Maguire of Marquette University, while the final chapter, called "An Interreligious Common Front," is by Paul F. Knitter of Xavier University.

After publication of the scholarly volume, a single-authored popular volume incorporating many of the scholars' ideas will be published by Fortress Press. Plans also call for the Religious Consultation to hold seminars for policymakers and journalists to further disseminate the progressive religious views on population, consumption and ecology contained in the books.

"Right to Family Planning" Project Begins

The Religious Consultation is in the initial stage of its newest project, "The Right to Family Planning, Contraception and Abortion in Ten World Religions." The project is supported by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation of Los Altos, California.

The unhelpful aspects of world religions in matters of fertility and gender roles are well known and are often thought to be the one and only orthodoxy. However, there are neglected but solid grounds for defending on religious grounds the moral right to family planning, contraception and abortion.

The project will bring together outstanding scholars of ten of the world's major religions. These scholars will re-evaluate their traditions and demonstrate that each provides justification for family planning, contraception and abortion. The resulting scholarly papers will be published in an academic volume and then in a popular volume, which will be aimed at population workers, policy-makers and a more general public. The project's scholars will continue to exist as a Task Force to present briefings and offer their expertise in future policy discussions on abortion, contraception and family planning issues here and abroad.

The co-directors of the project are Daniel Maguire, president of the Consultation, and Jacob Olupona of the Department of African American and African Studies at the University of California-Davis. Maguire and Olupona are reviewing the qualifications of religious scholars who will participate in the project. The project is also welcoming several social scientists to lend their scientific, medical and demographic skills to the religious scholars' consultations. The full team should be in place by the end of 1998. The first conference is set for Spring, 1999.

Chun-fang Yu Joins Consultation Board

Chun-fang Yu of the Department of Religion at Rutgers University has been appointed to the Board of Directors of the Religious Consultation. Professor Yu's area of expertise is Chinese religious traditions, particularly Chinese Buddhism. She is the author of The Renewal of Buddhism in China and co-editor of Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China.

Professor Yu has just completed a research project on contemporary Taiwanese nuns. She stayed with a community of nuns in Chi-yi, Taiwan for eight months and interviewed 40 nuns. The Hsiang-kuang Bhikuni Sangha was established in 1980 and has about 100 members. All of them are college graduates and engaged in teaching, social service, and cultural activities. Typical of the "new" Buddhism brought about by a revival movement since the 1970s, these young nuns are interested in making Buddhism socially engaged. Yu will write a book about them entitled, Nuns in Taiwan: The Case of Ksiang-kuang Bhikuni Sangha, in both Chinese and English. Prior to her current project, she finished a manuscript on Kuan-yin, the Chinese "Goddess of Mercy." It is entitled, "Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokiteshvara."

"Chun-fang was a participant in our first project on population, consumption and ecology," said Consultation president Daniel Maguire. "She is a brilliant scholar and a delightful person whose knowledge and experience will be most welcome on our board."

The next Consultation Board meeting is scheduled for December 12, 1998.

More Consultation News...

Daniel Maguire, president of the Religious Consultation, has agreed to serve on the advisory board of the Forum on Religion and Ecology, a group that will carry on the work of the recent Harvard conference series on the "Religions of the World and Ecology." Maguire addressed the "Christianity and Ecology" conference in April on the subject of "Population, Consumption, and Ecology: The Triple Problematic."

The Forum on Religion and Ecology, based at the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions, will have three principal goals: to ground the field of study in religion and ecology within academia; to disseminate materials for classroom use as well as for religious communities; and to foster the religious voice in policy issues on the environment by encouraging the interplay of the religions with science, education, economics, and public policy.

Consultation Board member Radhika Balakrishnan, Coordinator of the International Studies program at Marymount Manhattan College, recently returned from a 3-week sojourn to four south Asian countries: Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand and The Philippines. Her travels and research, sponsored by the Asia Foundation, were related to a study she is directing on subcontracted women workers in the context of the global economy.

Earlier this year, Balakrishnan attended the World Trade Organization ministerial meeting in Geneva where thousands of people outside the meeting hall protested the structure and various policies of the international body. In the past year, Balakrishnan has also been a frequent guest on Pacifica Radio, addressing the WTO, the Asian financial crisis and other international issues.

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Concerned about messages young American women receive about sexual activity, we examined twenty years' worth of sexual advice columns published by magazines aimed at teenaged women. The magazines included YM, Teen, Seventeen, Glamour, and Mademoiselle. We found little change in the form and dynamic of the story of sex told to young women over the years.

Using a narrative analysis technique known as "symbolic convergence" (E.G. Bormann, "Symbolic Convergence Theory: A Communication Formulation," Journal of Communication 35, No. 4 1985: 128-138), we located the action, setting and character themes that recur in the advice columns. Each magazine takes sexual activity, varied and done with numerous partners, to be a given. We found the magazines explaining to young women that sex is defined by male desire and pleasure and that their job is to accommodate men. The magazines rarely defined the setting in detail, implying that teens will have to be creative in finding places for sexual activity. A variety of related roles emerged for young women, all having to do with their responsibility to teach young men how to be good lovers and conversational partners.

What we did not find was any detailed or consistent set of advice about the possibility of abstinence, the use of birth control, the value of masturbation for sexual release, or any recognition of non-heterosexual relationships. In other words, definitions of sexual activity that would enhance young women's sense of themselves as valuable and worth protecting and pleasing were absent.

In our conclusion, we compared this advice to advice in marriage manuals and home economics manuals published earlier in this century. We found a direct line of continuity in the arguments. Women continue to be told to find out what a man wants and to please him. A key difference is that now, women are warned not to push for or to expect any commitment from men. Even the protection afforded by legal marriage is removed in today's advice to young women. Essentially, they are advised to put themselves at risk sexually without requiring any responsibility from their male partners for the consequences of sexual activity. Further comparison with men's magazines found these magazines encourage men to engage in promiscuous sex, to demand physical perfection and sexual compliance of female partners, and to leave the women if men's needs were not met.

Our final evaluation of advice such as this, given under the guise of sophistication and knowledge of how gender relations work, is that it robs young women of positive representations of responsible sexual relations, ones that may enhance their physical and emotional well-being.

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A new study conducted by Catholics for a Free Choice (CFFC) warns that the growing number of Catholic and non-Catholic hospital mergers in the United States is resulting in restricted access to reproductive health services for American women, particularly low income women.

The research has been published in a booklet entitled When Catholic and Non-Catholic Hospitals Merge: Reproductive Health Compromised. The report describes how the very nature of Catholic hospitals, along with the nationwide trend toward health care consolidation, threatens access to contraceptive education and services, surgical procedures like tubal ligations and abortions, and doctor-assisted reproductive technologies.

The report documents the increase in mergers and affiliations involving Catholic hospitals in the past few years and explains that Catholic-run institutions are required to follow the dictates of the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, issued by the US Catholic bishops. These Directives forbid not just abortion, but a wide range of family planning services: contraceptive devices, including condoms; vasectomies; tubal ligations; and artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization. Provision of the "morning after" pill to rape victims is forbidden, and preventive education about AIDS is restricted.

CFFC found that in 1996 the growth rate of the fastest expanding Catholic health care system was 47%, while the growth rate for the largest secular provider was just 3%. The number of Catholic sole provider hospitals (those in areas where no other health care institution is easily accessible) increased 65% from 46 in 1994 to 76 in 1997. In approximately one-third of the consolidations CFFC identified in 1996 and 1997, all reproductive health services were discontinued at the [formerly] non-Catholic facility.

What follows is an excerpt drawn from the conclusions of Reproductive Health Compromised.

"Studying consolidations involving Catholic health care institutions is a bit like peeling an onion. The task can bring tears to your eyes for, as this report demonstrates, about half of all mergers between Catholic and non-Catholic hospitals cause significant reductions in, or the outright elimination of, many reproductive health services.

"Abortion services are the least often affected, as few hospitals provide them. Most frequently eliminated are sterilization procedures, including postpartum sterilizations, and family planning services and referrals. Most seriously affected are low-income women, to whom few or no other health care providers may be available.

"As each layer of the merger onion is peeled away, there is some transparency -- some questions are answered -- but underneath, a deeper, denser set of questions, both quantitative and qualitative, is exposed. It is difficult to evaluate and categorize mergers, even more difficult to predict the outcomes of pending deals.

"Thus, it is necessary to conduct more research into the effect of consolidations on the provision of health care. To date, there are no data on the numbers of people actually affected by one or all mergers. We have no qualitative research that follows hospital patients who previously would have obtained reproductive health services in a hospital where services are now unavailable. Even the investigative reporting to describe clearly the day-to-day effect of a merger on services remains to be done. We suspect that in a number of cases services that have been "discontinued" are still quietly, although selectively, provided. Conversely, some services retained on paper may actually be largely unavailable.

"At the same time, some things are clear:

1. Consolidations involving Catholic and non-Catholic institutions show little sign of slowing down. Without strong advocacy for the preservation of reproductive health services, more communities nationwide will see these services eliminated.

2. Reproductive health advocates must focus greater attention on mergers between and among Catholic hospitals, as well as on the trend towards the creation of Catholic health plans linking together health maintenance organizations, physician groups, pharmacies, and other ancillary services. These integrated networks, which can constrain patients from every direction, may come to represent the greatest threat to reproductive health services.

3. While Catholic partners in merger negotiations seem to be increasingly insistent on public adherence to the Directives, creative solutions or liberal interpretations of the Directives, which permit some or most reproductive heath services, have not declined. Community and physician insistence on continuing such services has been and will remain critical.

4. Experience supports the fear that informal agreements to continue to provide reproductive health services, in spite of merger documents that demand adherence to the Directives, might be rescinded over time. Advocates should scrutinize whether the church will retain control over the operations of the combined system, and how and when this control can be exercised.

5. Pending mergers are in the spotlight more now than they were three or four years ago. This exposure works to the benefit of advocates for reproductive choice, but it may also lead to increased involvement of the Catholic hierarchy in health care consolidations.

"For Catholics for a Free Choice, it has been disheartening to observe how little attention is paid to larger questions of medical and health care ethics during the merger process. That a community or secular hospital would adopt religiously based Directives, which define what is a moral or immoral service, is deeply troubling in a pluralistic society. Is women's health well-served when bishops, rather than doctors, decide which health services will be available in a hospital?

In the end, the questions raised by mergers involving Catholic hospitals are basic questions about religious freedom, bodily integrity, and democracy. They deserve further attention."

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Guide to U.N. Treaties on Women's Rights Available

"Rights of Women: A Guide to the Most Important United Nations' Treaties on Women's Human Rights" is an excellent new publication that provides a comprehensive review of women's human rights protected by international law.

Published by the International Women's Tribune Centre, the manual provides a "right by right" guide to issues such as education, marriage, employment, refugees, sexual exploitation and trafficking, and torture by providing a global overview and then a description of relevant UN conventions. Developing rights for women are also discussed. A 'Taking Action' section offers effective strategies for using international law to better women's human rights--from holding a tribunal to building a human rights community via the Internet.

Written in simple, non-legal language, "Rights of Women" is an extremely user-friendly manual that is liberally illustrated with line drawings, diagrams and charts. It is designed to assist its readers, particularly those working with grassroots or community groups, to develop their own materials and undertake their own campaigns. Also included are resources, charts showing which countries have signed on to the conventions and the full text of key international human rights documents.

Orders and review copy requests should be sent to Women, Ink., 777 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017, USA. Tel: 212/687-8633; Fax: 212/661-2704. Email: wink@womenink.org. Web site: http://www.womenink.org. The cost is US$15.95 plus shipping and handling (free to women's groups in the global South).

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A Perspective on the Growing Force of
"Engaged Buddhism"

As a missionary religion, Buddhism has been quite adaptable. In China a natural affinity with Taoism led to the development of Chan (Zen); in Tibet tantric Buddhism from India merged with Bon animism to become Tibetan Buddhism. So what is Buddhism adapting to in the West today, as it becomes a religious presence in Europe and North America? Some point tongue-in-cheek to Hollywood's apparent affinity with Tibetan Buddhism; Buddhist-Christian dialogue has been lively and productive; and many are emphasizing the deep relationship between Buddhism and psychotherapy. But another fruitful affinity has developed: between Buddhism's emphasis on personal transformation (based on the world's richest tradition of meditative practices) and Western emphasis on social transformation (originally deriving from the Judeo-Christian prophetic concern for social justice). The result of this interaction has come to be known as engaged Buddhism and it is a growing force within Buddhism -- not only in the West, but reflexively in Asia as well. This year the Buddhist Peace Fellowship (based in Berkeley) celebrates its twentieth anniversary with an estimated 4,000 members, and next year the International Network of Engaged Buddhists, based in Bangkok but with branches in several countries, will celebrate its tenth anniversary. Both are finding plenty of social issues to keep them busy.

There has been some debate about whether engaged Buddhism is a natural development of Buddhism in the West, or more a result of the political preoccupations of the '60s generation that later became interested in Asian spirituality. Early Buddhism in India did not challenge the socio-political order prevalent at that time. The Buddha's Dharma and the Sangha order he established were generally accepted as an alternative moral and spiritual authority, which occasionally offered advice to rulers but did not threaten their power: Buddhist liberation was personal and usually involved leaving the social world, not transforming it. In China and Japan, however, Buddhism's missionary success became associated with its political co-optation: emperors were viewed as Buddhas incarnate, and in Japan the Mahayana vow to liberate all sentient beings became distorted into "safeguarding the nation" -- as embodied in the imperial family, of course. Zen became popular among the samurai because it taught them how to die better and how to kill better, eventually resulting in a militaristic Buddhism that supported modern imperialism and the Pacific War -- in short, not very different from Christianity during most of its history.

Our modern Western concern for democracy and human rights, however imperfectly realized, has created new opportunities for relating personal liberation with social liberation. And the social and economic crises we are now beginning to experience make such connections necessary, in the opinion of many engaged Buddhists. Given the catastrophic times we live in, it is increasingly difficult not to understand the five traditional Buddhist precepts in such broader terms:

1. No Killing has always applied to all sentient beings. Today the collapse or near-collapse of so many ecosystems, and the threatened extinction of so many plant and animal species, requires a more socially-engaged attempt to embody this precept.

2. No Stealing was traditionally defined as "not taking what is not given." Today we have an economic system that is based upon stealing, because it commodifies the whole earth and all its creatures into "natural resources" which it concentrates into the hands of a global elite.

3. No Lying, but, again, today we have systemic lying due to the fact that our increasingly-concentrated corporate media use their power not to inform and educate, but to exploit us for the sake of their true purpose, profits from advertising. So we are diverted from what is really happening by "infotainment" and sports spectacles. This perversion of what has become our international "nervous system" must be challenged.

4. No Harmful Sexual Behavior, sometimes defined as "sex that causes pain to others." Except for Japan, Buddhist monks and nuns are traditionally celibate, but that is not prescribed for laypeople: dating, marriage, divorce, etc. are secular matters unregulated by Buddhist teachings. Today the traditional Buddhist emphasis on the Buddhanature of all of us implies not only the liberation and empowerment of women everywhere, but opposition to all gender-based oppression and discrimination, and support for the development of healthy and responsible human relationships of all types (including gay and lesbian rights).

5. No Harmful Intoxicants which "cloud the mind," traditionally emphasizing alcohol. Today, however, what intoxicant clouds our minds more than the "never-enough" consumerism manipulated by an economic system that needs to keep manufacturing markets for the goods it keeps overproducing? The Buddha emphasized that craving is the source of our unhappiness (Dukkha). If so, we cannot solve the problem of our lives by acquiring and consuming more -- but that is precisely what our present economic and political systems encourage.

Buddhism and the Judeo-Christian traditions are both axial in the sense described by Karl Jaspers: outgrowths of a spiritual quickening that occurred simultaneously in many places about 600 - 400 BCE. This axial "turning" included the realization that both society and individuals are constructions that could be and should be reconstructed. In India and China, the emphasis has been on personal transformation; in the modern West, on social transformation ("progress" in one form or other). Their encounter today is an important one. The history of political revolution in the West (and, arguably, its technological development too, given its strong military connections) is a dismal one, for, without spiritual transformation as well, revolutions simply replace one gang of thugs with another. The history of religious transformation in Asia has also been a dismal one in the sense that, without social transformation, personal liberation becomes stifled into religious institutions that help to maintain oppressive socio-political regimes. Today, those of us who would change society confront the sociological paradox: humans create society, but society creates humans. The solution, I suggest, is the need to work on both sides at the same time. History suggests that either without the other will not take us anywhere we want to go.

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Looking at the Sun: Confronting the Glaring Eco-Crisis

It is hard to focus on our eco-crisis. It's so horrible we shy from it as we do from looking at the sun. But in order to get people to take a peek at the painful data, it helps to have a short primer of some of the basic problems our species faces. We as a species are a threat to all of the foundational elements of life on earth: water, topsoil, and air. Similarly, the fundamentals of our political economy are being dangerously transformed. This is the sun we have to look at for a moment.

This water planet lives on water or it dies. Less than one percent of the earth's water is usable by humans, and this treasure is unevenly distributed. Pure water is becoming scarcer than gold. The two water dangers are threatened supply and pollution. The Middle East illustrates the supply problem. Tony Allan, a water expert at the University of London, says the Middle East "ran out of water" in 1972 when its population stood at 122 million. At that point the region began to draw more water out of its aquifers than the rains could replenish. Today the population has doubled and the politics of water has grown intense. Water wars could be in our near future. Jordan's King Hussein once said that water was the only issue that could lead him to war with Israel. Most of Africa, the Near East, northern Asia, and Australia suffer from chronic water shortages. On the pollution side oysters and mussels, nature's water-purifying kidneys are becoming dangerously depleted. Meanwhile, farm and chemical wastes borne by land, sea, and air invade our precious sources of usable water.

All life depends on crop land and on that thin but indispensable treasure called topsoil. In 30 years, China, where one of five humans lives, lost in crop land the equivalent of all the farms in France, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands. In fact, 43 percent of the earth's vegetated surface is to some degree degraded, and it takes from 3,000 to 12,000 years to develop sufficient soil to form productive land. Our corruption reaches even to the skies. As Peter Barnes puts it: "At the rate we are burning fossil fuels -- and moving carbon from beneath the ground to the atmosphere--we'll double-glaze the planet by early next century, with unknowable consequences."

Not surprisingly, people, in solidarity with the decedent earth, are dying too. When it comes to impoverishment, the rule seems to be women and children first! Four million babies die yearly from diarrhea in the euphemistically entitled "developing world." Dr. Noeleen Heyzer of the United Nations says: "Poverty has a female face." Women constitute 70 percent of the world's 1.3 billion absolute poor, own less than 1 percent of the world's property but work two-thirds of the world's working hours. Microbes and viruses that found a life for themselves in the forests, have accepted deforesting humans as their new hosts. As Joel Cohen says: "The wild beasts of this century and the next are microbial, not carnivorous." More than thirty new diseases have been identified since 1973, many of them relating to our new and ecologically dangerous lifestyles.

The elitist illusion is that we can make nations or parts of them into gated communities, veiling from our eyes the decay and the huddled and hungry masses, but we can't. Poisons are as globalized as capital. They come to us in the strawberries and the rain. Professor David Orr gives us some of the scary data: male sperm counts worldwide have fallen by 50 percent since 1938. Human breast milk often contains more toxins than permissible in milk sold by dairies, signaling that some toxins have to be permitted by the dairies. At death some human bodies contain enough toxins and heavy metals to be classified as hazardous waste. Jeremiah warned us that it is hard to escape the effects of moral malignancy: "Do you think that you can be exempt? No, you cannot be exempt." (Jer. 25:5,29)

Meanwhile, there are more of us and in many places far too many of us. It took 10,000 generations to reach the first 2½ billion; it took one generation to double it. World population is like a triangle, with the reproductive young at the wide base and the old at the narrow top. Until the model comes closer to a rectangle, with a more balanced distribution of young and old, the growth will not stop, nor does anyone expect it to. Because the population of the industrialized nations is expected to decline over the next 50 years and because the world annual rate of increase has slowed in the last two years, we begin to hear a gospel of consolation proclaiming the end of the population problem. This is illusory. As Gennifer Mitchell says: "Over the next 25 years, some 3 billion people -- a number equal to the entire world population in 1960 -- will enter their reproductive years, but only about 1.8 billion will leave that phase of life. Assuming that the couples in this reproductive bulge begin to have children at fairly early ages, which is the global norm, the global population would still expand by 1.7 billion, even if all of those couples had only two children -- the long term replacement rate." Since most of that increase will occur in the overstressed poor world, the proclamation of the end of the population crisis is strategic myopia. The United Nations projects that world population will reach 9.4 billion by 2050 and nearly 11 billion eventually.

Note that I refer to the "poor world," not to "the third world." It is no longer meaningful, I submit, to divide the world up numerically into first, second, third, etc. If we insist on the numbers we would have to admit that there are third world sections, often based very much on color lines, in our first world. Also the propaganda terms "developed" and "developing" pull a "tissue of lies" over the facts of life, since the masses of the undernourished living in absolute poverty live in the world that is not developing for them, and the "developed nations" are overdeveloped ecological barbarians. Neither term, "developing" or "developed" is descriptive of reality. Development language is not on a mission of truth.

The big lie in development parlance -- we affluent folks are developed; the others are on their way to being like us -- is that there are enough resources for all peoples to go on gorge mode. As Gro Harlem Brundtland, head of the World Health Organization, said, "If 7 billion people were to consume as much energy and resources as we do in the West today, we would need 10 worlds, not one, to satisfy all our needs." If China ate fish at the rate the Japanese do, it would take the whole world's supply to feed them. There are clearly limits to sustainability, and we have reached them.

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Movers and Shakers:
Tracking the Activities of Our Participating Scholars

Grace M. Jantzen of the Centre for Religion, Culture and Gender at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom is editing a series of books for Manchester University Press called "Manchester Studies in Religion, Culture and Gender." The first, Becoming Divine: Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Religion, written by Jantzen, will be co-published in the U.S. by Indiana University Press and should be available before the end of 1998. Jantzen also recently edited a guest edition of the John Ryland Bulletin, entitled "Representation, Experience and Gender," as well as a guest edition of the Scottish Journal of Religious Studies, entitled "Beginning with Birth?" She has essays in each periodical. In October, she was scheduled to deliver a series of lectures in the Department of Theology at the University of Helsinki in Finland on the topic of "Necrophilia and Natality: What Does It Mean to Be Religious?" ...

John C. Raines recently relinquished his position as chair of the Department of Religion at Temple University in Philadelphia. He chaired the department from 1990-94 and from 1996-98. Raines is co-directing the Religious Consultation project on "Men's Obligations to Women." He is also applying for a Fulbright grant, which he hopes will enable him to spend time in Jakarta where he will work with local religious scholars to help initiate the first comparative religious studies program at the University of Indonesia. A previous Fulbright Research award enabled him to study the Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia in 1994. The group has been active in the agitation against Malaysian strongman Mohammad Mahathir. ...

Judith Plaskow of Manhattan College, current President of the American Academy of Religion, will preside over the AAR's annual conference November 21-24 in Orlando, Florida. Plaskow's article, "Sexual Orientation and Human Rights: A Progressive Jewish Perspective," appears in a new book called Sexual Orientation and Human Rights in American Religious Discourse, edited by Saul Olyan and Martha Nussbaum (Oxford University Press, 1998). ...

Marvin Ellison of Bangor Theological Seminary is the newly elected chair of the Maine Interfaith Council on Reproductive Choices, a statewide network of pro-choice clergy and other religious leaders committed to promoting education and public policy that guarantees reproductive self-determination. The group is currently working to defeat a legislative proposal that would ban late term abortions in the state of Maine. ...

Krister Stendahl of the Harvard Divinity School recently retired and has relinquished his positions as a board member of the Population Council and co-director of the Osher Center for Tolerance and Pluralism at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He continues to lecture occasionally and his most recently published piece deals with the topic he has worked on for some time: expressing a Christian theology that allows for a genuine pluralism. "Qumran and Supersessionism -- and the Road Not Taken" can be found in The Princeton Seminary Bulletin 19:2 (1998) 134-142. ...

Julia Ching is now the R.C. and E.Y. Lee Chair Professor at the University of Toronto. Her latest book, The Butterfly Healing: A Life Between East and West, was published by Orbis Press this year. It is a literary memoir with reflections on religions and therapies, East and West. Cambridge University Press published Ching's Mysticism and Kingship in China in 1997. She is currently teaching a new course, "Ethical Responses to Global Issues," at the University of Toronto. ...

Rita M. Gross of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire will have her latest book, Soaring and Settling: Buddhist Perspectives on Contemporary Social and Religious Issues, published by Continuum late this year. This past summer, she served as scholar-in-residence at the San Francisco Zen Center. ...

Larry Rasmussen of Union Theological Seminary in New York has been named a Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology for 1998-99. The fellowship is awarded by the Association of Theological Schools in the U.S. and Canada. Rasmussen's project is entitled "Moral Frame-works and Deep Divisions." Its goal is to reread selected religious traditions and moral theory in such a way that social and environmental issues are understood as integral to one another and are addressed together. ...

Aruna Gnanadason of the Women's Programme of the World Council of Churches has been named to head the WCC's work on Justice, Peace and Creation. One of the major projects for this division in 1999 is reopening discussion of biotechnology, including reproductive technology, among WCC member churches. Gnanadason has also been deeply involved in helping to organize a gathering of women from throughout the world in Harare, Zimbabwe this November. The occasion is a celebration of the end of the World Council of Churches' Ecumenical Decade of the Churches in Solidarity with Women. Up to 1,000 women are expected to attend. ...

Susannah Heschel has joined the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College. Her most recent books are Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (University of Chicago Press, 1998) and Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, edited with David Biale and Michael Galchinsky (University of California Press, 1998). Articles published this year include "Church Protests During the Third Reich: A Report on Two Cases," Kirckliche Zeitgeschichte 10. Jahrgang Heft 2 (1988), 377-388, and an essay in The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, edited by Simon Weisenthal, published by Schocken Books. ...

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