Charles R. Lightner

Professor Baruch Levine of New York University contributed a paper to the Neusner-Chilton volume titled “The Golden Rule in Ancient Israeli Scripture”. Levine’s approach is scholarly, as opposed to religious, and he defines “ancient” as including what is typically known as the Hebrew Bible. That is: he looks to the texts of the Tanakh and not to the later rabbinic literature. Levin...

The collection of papers edited by Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton differs meaningfully from the books on the Golden Rule written by Jefferey Wattles and Harry Gensler. First, it is a collection of fourteen scholarly papers by authors with varied academic, religious and philosophical backgrounds. But the authors are academics and the papers are academic. I make that point to distingui...

Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton, distinguished scholars and prolific authors, edited a volume of papers prepared for a conference on the Golden Rule in 2008. Fourteen papers were collected in a book titled “The Golden Rule: The Ethics of Reciprocity in World Religions”, which is impressive in both breadth and depth of analysis. I will address a number of issues raised in several of th...

Dr. Harry J. Gensler is a Jesuit priest, a professor of philosophy at Loyola University and author of over a dozen books including “Ethics and the Golden Rule” published in 2013 (Routledge). Gensler Is one of the few true golden rule scholars, having written his doctoral dissertation on the rule in 1977; one of only two dissertations (in English) that have been written on the rule. ...

This is just a brief note on terminology. There are many who term the Golden Rule an ethic of reciprocity. In fact, one of the few books written in English that is devoted to Golden Rule study and analysis is subtitled “The Ethics of Reciprocity in World Religions” (edited by Neusner and Chilton, 2008). Both Jeffrey Wattles and Harry J. Gensler (whose book I’ll write more on soon) ...

I continue to work through “The Golden Rule” by Jeffrey Wattles (Oxford University Press, 1996), which is one of the few works acknowledged as a truly comprehensive scholarly treatment of the subject. There’s no question that it is thoroughly researched and representative of a deeply thought engagement with the topic. I want to stop here to make a couple of interim points that I think...

Having spent some time now studying the work of the secular philosophers, I'm now going to spend some time on the work of those scholars who have made specific study of the golden rule; its place in world religious and ethical study; its strengths and weaknesses as a universal ethic; and, proposals to cure the weaknesses observed. It could be argued that I should have started at this ...