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Chapter Two What Is Our Sacred Responsibility in the World? This second chapter examines four particular ways in which faith has been expressed as a commitment to one’s responsibilities vis-à-vis one’s community and God. It extends the discussion of the first chapter, as the commitment to a certain path or a sense of religious responsibility emerges from the experience of trust in the sacred, dependence on God, or belonging to a world of meaning and value. Here as elsewhere in this book, my choice is guided not by an intention to be comprehensive or even equitable in the attention given to each tradition, but rather, by what I find to be thematically most relevant. That said, this chapter discusses Hindu epic illustrations of dharma, or sacred duty; an allegorical extrapolation of Christian responsibility in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series as well as his discussion of the relationship between faith and works;1 Islamic understanding of human beings as God’s caliphs (khalifa) and the responsibility for jihad; and Jewish articulations of human responsibility in a covenantal relationship with God.These examples concern a specific interface of religious ethics and the commitment to faith, by which one embraces a tremendous sense of responsibility for the very fate of the human world. Hindu Dharma Dharma can be translated as natural law, sacred duty, responsibility, or even religion. In common parlance, it represents an ideal way of life that promises happiness and well-being. Many religious commentators depict dharma as the center of Hindu religion. Hindu tradition and texts teach that every person has a set of duties, or svadharma, uniquely his or her own, determined traditionally by one’s caste, gender, age, opportunities, and web of relationships with other people. These are not merely practical obligations, but sacred duties that weave individuals together to constitute a society. The centrality of dharma and its content (what are one’s duties) are most powerfully illustrated in the great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and conceptually justified in Dharmasastras like the Laws of Manu. Dharma is less a legal code than a moral ideal that has been enforced by cultural custom and, in earlier times, by royal ordinance.2 The Laws of Manu derives dharma from revealed and traditional scripture as well as from social custom and even what is pleasing to oneself.3 Dharma is one of the four central goals of human life, according to Hindu teaching. The others are artha, or economic prosperity and well-being; kama, or sensual pleasure; and moksha, or liberation from the cycle of rebirth. While moksha is the ultimate goal of human life, Hindus believe it requires a sophisticated level of spiritual development that may occupy hundreds or thousands of lifetimes. Dharma, artha, and kama, by contrast, are the goals pursued at every stage of spiritual development within a current birth. Seen together, they demonstrate a Hindu value of balance in life’s pursuits, and a sense that there is an appropriate time and place for all the good things in life. J. A. B. van Buitenen suggests that artha, kama, and dharma are all essentially dharma, insofar as they uphold the established order, while moksha abandons it for a higher self-realization that is not possible in the realm of samsara (the cycle of rebirth).4 Dharma cultivates norms for action in this world of samsara. Because a person’s dharma is determined by her particular life circumstances and relationships to others, it defines personal identity in relation to others.Who am I? I am specifically a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, a friend, and a teacher. My individuality emerges from this particular web of relationships and obligations that comprise my dharma. My very identity as this unique person and not somebody else is constituted by my dharmic relationships. As Arti Dhand notes, Hindu formulation of dharma offers a relational constitution of self and rejects the notion, proffered in some Western ethics, of a universal person, with general and universal duties. There is a universal notion of selfhood (located at the level of atman, or soul), but a person is always particularized. One is never a generic human, but a woman or a man of a particular ethnicity and other such particularities.5 The root dhr means to support or maintain, so dharma also means the right, the good, or the natural or moral order, which all living beings follow. These various levels of dharmic duty are interwoven, so...

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