At the Practical Matters conference at Emory University in March 2018, four graduates of Emory’s Initiative in Religious Practices and Practical Theology shared their “big idea” for the study of religious practices. Practical Matters Journal is proud to publish each of these videos in full, including one by Dr. Brendan Ozawa-de Silva, below.
Ozawa-de Silva maintains that it is possible to teach values like compassion, empathy, and gratitude beyond the parameters of one particular religious tradition. Ozawa-de Silva interweaves teachings from the Dalai Lama with insight from evolutionary history and contemporary neuroscience in order to address the need for secular ethics in education. With “compassion at the core,” Ozawa-de Silva invites practical theology and the study of religious practices to both study and teach pro-social ethics and values.
