JRE 47.1:166–179. © 2019 Journal of Religious Ethics, Inc. PUTTING RELIGION BACK INTO RELIGIOUS ETHICS Eric Gregory ABSTRACT This essay on Richard Miller’s Friends and Other Strangers (2016) locates its arguments in the context of how the practice of religious ethics bears upon debates about normativity in the study of religion and the cultural turn in the humanities. After reviewing its main claims about identity and otherness, I focus on three areas. First, while commending Miller’s effort to analogize virtuous empathy with Augustine’s ethics of rightly ordered love, I raise questions about his use of Augustine and his distinctive formulation of Augustinian “iconic realism.” Second, I suggest his discussion of public reason is at odds with the dialogical spirit of the book and may distract from the democratic solidarity required by our political moment. Third, more briefly, I highlight the practical implications of Miller’s vision for higher education at both the graduate and undergraduate level. KEYWORDS: Richard Miller, religious ethics, culture, empathy, identity, alterity, Augustine, realism, war, love, responsibility, Black Lives Matter, structural injustice, public reason, higher education Friends and Other Strangers (2016) is a timely intervention in the uncer- tain field of religious ethics. The book deserves a wide audience given per- sistent yet evolving debates about normativity in the study of religion and the distinctive character of ethical inquiry that takes diverse religious be- liefs, institutions, and practices seriously. Its themes range from account- ability to utopia. Its topics include the ethics of ethnography, childrearing, friendship, war, and memory. Extending previous work, Richard Miller elegantly joins rigor, learnedness, and imagination in showing the fruits of a cultural turn in religious ethics that highlights dynamic relations of identity and otherness in the social practices of everyday life. He also offers several examples of related work in comparative religious ethics and dem- ocratic social criticism that suggest future research directions and greater clarity about the subject matter of religious ethics. The book’s epilogue, for example, critically surveys work by Saba Mahmood, Farhat Moazam, Charles Hirschkind, Jeffrey Stout, Elizabeth Bucar, and Sherine Hamdy in light of Miller’s own methodological claims and his desire to eschew moral relativism and radical historicism. Yet this work is neither mani- festo nor orthodoxy. It does not propose a single method for the complicated Eric Gregory is Professor of Religion and Chair of the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. Eric Gregory, gregory@princeton.edu.