Exploring how religious and secular forces interact in the modern world.
Modern religious actors are anxious about their own inevitable secularity, which has always been a condition of their existence.
Read More →The city of Los Angeles—a diverse, cosmopolitan, dynamically changing landscape—provides unique insights into how American Muslim and Catholic communities are engaging with the new plurality at different stages of their respective historical evolutions in the ever-changing American religious and legal-ethical landscape. Read the full article »
Read More →Christian-Muslim relations have followed a sinuous path throughout the centuries. At times they have provided reason for hope, and at others they have encountered stumbling blocks in the path to mutual understanding. The Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium is presented on both sides as a new step in the history of Christian-Muslim understanding. Read the full article »
Read More →Evangelii Gaudium goes beyond providing an introduction to interreligious dialogue from the perspective of the new “Poverello” of Rome, Pope Francis. It is, and I feel sure of this, an emphatic proposal for interreligious dialogue to be reframed as a duty for religious communities, and an essential condition to the establishment and maintenance of peace in the world. Read the full article »
Read More →Since his election in March 2013, Pope Francis has aroused enthusiasm and raised the hopes of many through the articulation and lived example of his vision of a Church open to dialogue with the modern world. Pope Francis’ recent Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, is no exception, delivering an even more explicit invitation for the Church to avoid entrenchment. Read the full article »
Read More →The business of creating a more practical multiculturalism and overcoming the challenges presented by diversity is more complex than it first seems. My research set out to investigate how projects in the UK are bringing diverse groups together and forming what Harvard scholar Danielle Allen has called ‘political friendships’ across difference. Dialogue is all very well, but without tangible common action it is hard to create any sense of shared destiny. The future success of multiculturalism will not be won by lofty new theories or more debates on national identity, but by encouraging real relationships at a grass roots level between people of every background and belief. Read the full article »
Read More →The Contending Modernities Global Migration working group is pleased to announce an interdisciplinary conference to be held in London, UK on 14 & 15 October 2013 – The New Cosmopolitanism: Global Migration and the Building of a Common Life. The conference grows out of the working group’s research project in London, which focuses on the ways that broad-based community organizing enables secular and religious citizens to build a common life. The conference will bring this research into dialogue with a wide range of theoretical and empirical research on the role of faith in public life in pluralist and culturally diverse societies. Read the full article »
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