The CEDAR Occasional Paper Series aims to initiate discussion about the role of practice and embodied knowledge in understanding issues of religion and public life. Contributors include CEDAR network alumni, staff, and associates who have been connected to the CEDAR experience and write from within their local contexts on issues of religion and public life. The papers seek to develop a space where the academic, religious, political, and development worlds intersect, yielding new insights into the challenges of everyday life and the need to live better with difference.
The views expressed in the CEDAR Occasional Papers are those of the individual authors and are intended both to generate discussion and to extend the CEDAR experience.
* Between 2008 and 2012 the CEDAR Occasional Paper Series was published as the ISSRPL Occasional Paper Series.
Abiding Issues Concerning Race and Religion in American Communities Sarah MacMillen With the recent news items on racial profiling and police actions against African Americans in the United States, a set of questions and problematics burst forward from a productive dialogue between sociological and religious views on the topics of race and diversity. Typically in…
Read More »Actionable Pluralism and Toleration in Religiously Diverse Societies: For Whom and for What? Asim Jusić Multiculturalism is dead— and thank God for that. –graffito on a building in Bosnia In this paper I analyze and criticize the approach of pluralist and tolerationist theories to religious diversity in action. Following a discussion on actionable pluralist and…
Read More »Pluralism versus Tolerance: Turning Principles into Action in Interfaith Organizations Lauren R. Kerby In contemporary discussions of how societies manage religious diversity, two strategies are often juxtaposed: pluralism and tolerance. Both are attitudes that shape the kind of interaction between different religious groups in such a way that peace and social order are maintained. However,…
Read More »Fixing the House: The Challenge of Tolerating the “Other” in Public and in Private Maja Šoštarić “Imagine that a rat somehow enters your house. What do you do? Essentially, you have two options. One is to kill the rat. Another one is to fix the house.” (Indonesian kyai – Islamic scholar, during a visit to…
Read More »Rejecting Utopias, Embracing Modesty: Reflections on Interreligious Peacebuilding in Light of the International Summer School on Religion and Public Life James W. McCarty, III My field of study, Christian Social Ethics, is a child of the “Social Gospel” movement.[i] At its best, this movement represents the incredible possibilities of constructive and theologically informed Christian political…
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