The CEDAR Forum on Difference is a blog focusing on contemporary issues of living with difference in a global society. Contributors include CEDAR network alumni, staff, and associates who have been part of the CEDAR experience and write from within their local contexts on issues of difference and public life. The forum serves to critique popular assumptions on religion and difference through the experience and insight of the CEDAR network. The views expressed in the CEDAR Forum on Difference are those of the individual authors and are intended both to generate discussion and to extend the CEDAR experience.
Latest Posts
Students Share the Burden of Education, by David W. Montgomery
The priorities of the university are changing and these changes put at risk one critical dimension of the university’s role in society as a place of reflective (self-) learning. Much has been written about the marketization of education and the trend toward running universities as businesses concerned with efficiencies and bottom lines,[1] pushed even further…Read More »"Forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors": The Unfinished Business of the Lord's Resistance Army, by David-Ngendo Tshimba
It was recently reported in one of Uganda’s daily newspapers (Daily Monitor) that the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebel leader, Joseph Kony, had written to Ugandans seeking forgiveness and a resumption of peace talks to end the insurgency. Kony’s letter, dispatched by Mission Okello, reads in part: “I want to assure the people of Uganda…Read More »How Can I Accept the Other as Being Different from Me So That South Sudan Can Be at Peace?, by Noel Santo
On 9th July, 2011, South Sudan, then part of the Sudan, became an independent country. The huge majority of the population of South Sudan considered this step a colossal victory—something that they had sought for a long time. But one main challenge that accompanied breaking up South Sudan just as it gained its independence was…Read More »How come a self-proclaimed progressive Jew sides with halal meat?, by Rahel Wasserfall
Last week, by chance, I watched a video from the site AKADEM, the French cultural site on all things Jewish (November 20, 2013). Claude Askolovitch, a self-identified progressive Jewish journalist, explained that he was let go from his job as a journalist at Le Point because of an article he wrote defending halal slaughter in…Read More »Musings on diversity from Vienna, Sarajevo, and New York, by Maja Šoštarić
On a sunny morning in August 2013, as I exited the peaceful Parc des Bastions in Geneva, Switzerland and passed by the oversized chess figures near the park gate, I was astonished to see some familiar faces, a real blast from the past, on coming out into Place de Neuve. There they were again: four…Read More »