This course explores religion’s challenge to ethics. It is a modern myth to suppose that all religions endorse the same ideals. The content and the status of ethics both differ dramatically among religious traditions, and within traditions. Concentrating on Buddhist and Christian traditions this course helps students develop more nuanced approaches to ethical issues and conflicts. Students study the moral significance of cosmogonic myths, divine commands, precepts, virtues, monasticisrn, natural law, and the lives of saints and bodhisattvas, and attend carefully to the relationship of ethics to ritual and to the nature and limits of the moral community.