New Publication: Effective Altruism and Religion

A new volume with essays on EA from a religious perspectives is out.

The volume is open access. The first three chapters—after Lara Buchak’s foreword—provide a general take on EA from a Buddhist, Christian, and Orthodox Jewish perspective. Among the other chapters, I would particularly like to highlight Stefan Riedener’s chapter. Given the focus on extinction risks in EA, his clear and helpful analysis from a Christian (more specifically: Thomist) perspective is a very valuable contribution.

How you can help: if you know academics in the field of religion, you can point them towards the volume or to one of these chapters. If you know anyone whom I should send a physical copy, let me know.

This volume is not the final word on the intersection of EA and Religion. It mostly consists of the written versions of papers given at the first—and exploratory—academic workshop on this theme. The book’s main purpose is to get the ball rolling. Its aim is for EA to be taken seriously as a provider of important ideas in an area – religion – where altruism has long played a central role but where many EA themes (such as effectiveness, empirical evidence, etc) are often absent.

Important: this is an academic book about effective altruism rather than an outreach book making the case for effective altruism. However, for a Christian audience the latter is in the works as well. We hope to finish it in a couple of months. Thus, if you’d like to pass on something to Christian friends and family, this latter book will be the useful thing to pass on. We will post about it on the Forum once it’s out.