1. These commitments are themselves complex issues and challenging to define. For one brief history of “religion” as an idea, see Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, Mark C. Taylor, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 269–284.
2. A number of other insightful histories of comparative religious ethics have been produced, so we will not duplicate such work here. See especially Sumner B. Twiss, “Four Paradigms in Teaching Comparative Religious Ethics,” in Explorations in Global Ethics: Comparative Religious Ethics and Interreligious Dialogue, edited by Bruce Grelle and Sumner Twiss (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1998), 11–33;
3. Sumner B. Twiss, “Comparison in Religious Ethics,” in The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics, William Schweiker, ed. (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 147–155.
4. For a recent example, see Donald Swearer, “History of Religions,” in The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics, William Schweiker, ed. (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 138–146.
5. Elizabeth M. Bucar, “Methodological Invention as a Constructive Project: Exploring the Production of Ethical Knowledge Through the Interaction of Discursive Logics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 36, no. 3 (2008): 355–374.