Futures and Uncertainties

The last of the fiftieth anniversary issues of the Journal of Religious Ethics (JRE) explores the future of our field.The call for papers for this issue, the fourth of four themed collections, asks scholars to investigate issues that will likely shape religious ethics for the next 25 years.The call, under the umbrella theme of "Futures and Uncertainties," explicitly names climate change and artificial intelligence (AI), as well as globalization and increased cultural polarization, as topics of increasing relevance.In 2048, 25 years from now, what will be the important issues for the field of religious ethics?More specifically, which facts of our existence will remain or become central to the study of religious ethics?We might consider, for example, that the world population is projected to grow to over 9.6 billion and that the most populous nations in the world will be India, followed by China, the United States, Nigeria, and Indonesia.The United Nations estimates that the number of people facing water scarcity will double by 2050, resulting in the involuntary mass migration of over one billion people (Nagabhatla 2020).Average temperatures will rise by 1.5C (2.7Fahrenheit), and the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere will reach 685 parts per million (OECD 2012).With population growth and climate change, concerns about how we ought to navigate questions of equity and justice amidst concerns of scarcity loom large in the five essays written for this issue.The human cost of rising sea levels, diminishing sources of fresh water, and intensifying catastrophic weather events, however, is unevenly distributed.Environmental disasters disproportionately affect poor, sick, and disenfranchised communities.Unspoken but clearly present throughout the essays are the indelible imprints left on our national consciousness by the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements.The essays address a range of topics from climate change to reproductive ethics but all have in common a deep concern about justice.As religious ethicists, the authors draw from multiple religious traditions to offer insights into these problems.They also offer perspectives that contribute to the multidisciplinary approaches necessary to respond to these complex crises.The authors writing for this issue utilize resources from within religious ethics to develop visions of a more just future amidst rapid change.One theme that runs through all the articles is a push to expand notions of justice so as to include

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