Resilience and Interdependence: Christian and Buddhist Views of Social Responsibility Following Natural Disasters
Presentation
Overview
Overview
Description
The paper adopts this approach in a comparative study of Christian and Buddhist social ethics that address the structural injustice and discrimination that apply to the cases of Hurricane Katrina and the Japanese Tsunami where government officials neglected infrastructure (levees in the case of the former; sea walls and floodgates in the case of the latter), which resulted in significant personal harm to African Americans in New Orleans and rural Japanese in Japan. In particular it examines Christian and Buddhist views of social responsibility exemplified in the idea of communal resilience, which appears in the theology of Michael Eric Dyson and literature of Toni Morrison, and the notion of interdependence promoted by Thich Nhat Hanh and other Engaged Buddhists.
