It was once said that this is the land of the free. There is, I believe, a statue out there in the harbor, with something written on it about “Give me your hungry…your oppressed…give me...

But a society in which pluralism is not undergirded by some shared values and held together by some measure of mutual trust simply cannot survive. Pluralism that reflects no commitments whatever to the common good...

The lights became stars, which became streaks in the grayspace, and then networks of fading shimmers

Walter Mignolo terms and articulates _critical cosmopolitanism, juxtaposing it with globalization, which is a process of “the homogeneity of the planet from above––economically, politically and culturally.” Although _globalization from below_ is to counter _globalization from...

At one moment, his eyes sparkled in the light and in the next they were enshrouded in shadow. What connected those bands of light and dark? Could they indeed have been distinct entities?

Whenever one comes to the the table for interreligous dialogue, there is what I would call an _ecumenical taboo_ that one has to comply with. The ecumenical taboo_ does not exist in a written document,...

It’s a curious thing in American life that the most abject nonsense will be excused if the utterer can claim the sanction of religion. A country which forbids an established church by law is prey...

[…] pluralism implies religious tolerance, not unchecked religious freedom.

In the moral realm, there is very little consensus left in Western countries over the proper basis of moral behavior. And because of the power of the media, for millions of men and women the...

Christianity has been the means of reducing more languages to writing than have all other factors combined. It has created more schools, more theories of education, and more systems than has any other one force....

America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance — it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not...

Yet while I do this work because of my faith, I also recognize of course that in a pluralistic society there are many different perspectives. It is both unrealistic and wrong to insist that everyone...

Another way to describe the dilemma for religious faith is that pluralism creates social conditions in which God is no longer an inevitability. While it is possible to believe in God, one has to work...

It is not a Buddhist approach to say that if everyone practiced Buddhism, the world would be a better place. Wars and oppression begin from this kind of thinking.

Whatever we may think of the merits of torturing children for pleasure, and no doubt there is much to be said on both sides, I am sure we all agree that it should be done...

Tolerance is the price we pay for living in a free, pluralistic society.

Evangelicals have squandered their cultural capital because they have tried to reclaim a standing in American culture that they never had. The American Founding was a mix of fragmented religious (and not-so-religious) voices.

The construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimilation of non-European peoples to European civilization. The idea that people’s historical...

A love of neighbor manifests itself in the tolerance not only of opinions of others but, what is more important, of the essence and uniqueness of others, when we subscribe to that religious philosophy of...

We believe that religions are basically the same…they only differ on matters of creation, sin, heaven, hell, God, and salvation.

Nothing—not even the US Army—more threatens the future of a democratic, pluralistic and (dare we wish, secular) Iraq than the political ascendancy of Islamic fascists like Al Sadr.