After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement

by Courtney Bender (Editor), Pamela E. Klassen (Editor)

Overview

Religious pluralism has become a powerful ideal in contemporary life, defining the landscape of religious diversity while prescribing modes of acting across difference. Taking this ideal as a starting place, the contributors to this volume treat pluralism as historically and ideologically produced and as a doctrine that is embedded within a range of political, civic, and cultural institutions. Their critique interrogates the possibility that religious difference itself is framed as a problem only pluralism can solve.

Working comparatively across nations and disciplines, these essays explore pluralism as a "term of art" setting the norms of identity and the parameters of exchange, encounter, and conflict. Contributors locate pluralism's ideals in diverse sites-Broadway plays, Polish Holocaust memorials, Egyptian dream interpretations, German jails, and legal theories-and demonstrate its shaping of political and social interaction in surprising and powerful ways. Throughout they question assumptions underlying pluralism's discourse and its influence on the legal decisions that determine modern religious practice. Contributors do more than deconstruct this theory; they tackle what comes next. Having established the genealogy and effects of pluralism, they generate new questions for engaging the collective worlds and multiple registers in which religion operates.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231527262
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	05/11/2012
Series:	Religion, Culture, and Public Life
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	17 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Courtney Bender is associate professor of religion at Columbia University and the author of The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination.

Pamela E. Klassen is associate professor of religion at the University of Toronto and the author of Healing Christians: Medicine, Modernity, and the Spirits of Protestantism.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Habits of Pluralism
Pamela E. Klassen and Courtney Bender
Part I. Law, Normativity, and the Constitution of Religion
1. Ethics After Pluralism
Janet R. Jakobsen
2. Pluralizing Religion: Islamic Law and the Anxiety of Reasoned Deliberation
Anver M. Emon
3. Religion Naturalized: The New Establishment
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
4. The Cultural Limits of Legal Tolerance
Benjamin L. Berger
Part II. Performing Religion After Pluralism
5. The Birth of Theatrical Liberalism
Andrea Most
6. The Perils of Pluralism: Colonization and Decolonization in American Indian Religious History
Tracy Leavelle
7. A Matter of Interpretation: Dreams, Islam, and Psychology in Egypt
Amira Mittermaier
8. The Temple of Religion and the Politics of Religious Pluralism: Judeo-Christian America at the 1939–1940 New York World's Fair
J. Terry Todd
Part III. The Ghosts of Pluralism: Unintended Consequences of Institutional and Legal Constructions
9. Native American Religious Freedom Beyond the First Amendment
Michael D. McNally
10. Saving Darfur: Enacting Pluralism in Terms of Gender, Genocide, and Militarized Human Rights
Rosemary R. Hicks
11. What Is Religious Pluralism in a "Monocultural" Society? Considerations from Postcommunist Poland
Geneviève Zubrzycki
12. The Curious Attraction of Religion in East German Prisons
Irene Becci
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index

What People are Saying About This

Nathaniel Deutsch

The first volume to bring together scholars from a variety of fields whose work critically examines the genealogy of secularism and its relationship to pluralism, the potentially negative implications and underlying assumptions of tolerance, and the naturalized hegemony of the law vis-à-vis religion in liberal democracies. Taken as a whole, After Pluralism serves as a response and probably the most ambitious and influential effort to map out religious pluralism in the United States.

Editorial Reviews

After Pluralism brings us astonishing new insight into the underpinnings, uses, and limits of religious pluralism in many settings — from US and Canadian law courts, to the sacred lands of indigenous peoples, the American theatre, Cairo television, German prisons, and more. Its closely reasoned and beautifully illustrated essays make us rethink the ways in which religions are and can be lived in the world. A deeply important book for our time.

Natalie Zemon Davis

After Pluralism is an outstanding collection of essays on religious diversity by a group of multidisciplinary scholars. Their work is at the cutting edge of the relationship between religion, culture, law, and public life in a post-secular age. The introduction is an invaluable guide not only to the book but to the whole field as well.

James Tully

How has religious difference been constructed as a problem to which 'pluralism' becomes the solution? From within a rich variety of historical settings and international case studies, the essays collected in After Pluralism reveal 'pluralism' as an ideological and normative space, a discursive frame within which questions of religious difference may legitimately be engaged but which nevertheless cannot account for the messiness of religion on the ground, where 'dialogue' and 'recognition' between discrete religions and religious actors are seldom to be seen. In the process, religions emerge as shifting constellations of belief and practice continually made and remade within relations of power that are not always in need of resolution or amenable to it. An accomplished, exhilarating, and game-changing book.

Tracy Fessenden