Teaching Christian Ethics (without the Western trappings) in the Majority World

LINDSAY WILSON
Dr Lindsay Wilson
Academic Dean and Senior Lecturer in Old Testament
Ridley College, Melbourne

Seminar title: Teaching Christian Ethics (without the Western trappings) in the Majority World
One contribution of postcolonialism has been to alert us to the need to distinguish between the way courses have been taught in a Western setting, and the best way to teach in a majority world context. In teaching ethics in South and Southeast Asia, a number of areas needed to be rethought: the syllabus content itself; the amount of Western philosophical ideas included; the need to have different conversation partners (e.g. Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism); the teaching methods; the need to focus more on honour/shame issues; the incorporation of community perspectives as well as individual decision-making; the significance of character ethics; the selection of ethical issues to be discussed; the suitability of available ethics textbooks and resources; the lack of majority world scholar doing research in many areas of ethics. This seminar is aimed at raising questions about these issues, and learning from each other how we might better teach ethics in a majority world context.