Saturday, July 17, 2010

The ethical will: is living it enough?

[Note: This is a re-post of the May 13, 2010 entry on my former Open Forum blog.]


In the chapter entitled "Justice" in my book Creative License, I talk about ethical wills and link the concept of justice - and the way we uphold it in our lives - to the leaving of an ethical will.  At the outset, I talk of my sadness that my mother left me no written or recorded words.  And though I fully acknowledge that it is the life she lived, exemplary of upholding, fighting for and modeling social justice, that was her ethical will and my cherished inheritance, in the end I have written these sermons and published this book ... perhaps as the ethical will for my children, as I do want the words on paper so they may never repeat my struggle of questioning why nothing was left for them.  A life in pursuit of justice is inextricably linked, for me, to the ethical will.  Yet as a person of words, I seem to find that the action and the example do not suffice.  I'd love to hear from others, here and/or at the blog on my book's site:  What fundamental values and struggles do you find bound up in the notion of the ethical imperatives we wish to imprint on our ethical heirs?  And if we live it, is that enough, or must we leave it in a more indelible form?

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