Diversity Resources Portal: Religion

This wide-ranging reader combines some of the best and most valuable contemporary perspectives from leading and significant writers, teachers, and thinkers who together address critical challenges and opportunities for the world's religions in a post 9/11 world.

Examines how far a firm faith can allow for toleration of difference and respect the need for religious freedom. It elucidates the philosophical credentials of different approaches to truth in religion, ranging from a dogmatic fundamentalism to a pluralism that shades into relativism.

This volume highlights how the factual situation of cultural and religious diversity may lead to individual, social and political choices of organized and recognized pluralism.

What impulse prompted some newspapers to attribute the murder of 77 Norwegians to Islamic extremists, until it became evident that a right-wing Norwegian terrorist was the perpetrator? Why did Switzerland, a country of four minarets, vote to ban those structures? How did a proposed Muslim cultural center in lower Manhattan ignite a fevered political debate across the United States? In The New Religious Intolerance, Martha C. Nussbaum surveys such developments and identifies the fear behind these reactions. Drawing inspiration from philosophy, history, and literature, she suggests a route past this limiting response and toward a more equitable, imaginative, and free society.

The author takes the reader on a hopeful journey through America's religious heartland, shining a light on the multitude of congregations that are reaching across theological boundaries not with tolerance, but with respect.

American Grace is based on two of the most comprehensive surveys ever conducted on religion and public life in America. It includes a dozen in-depth profiles of diverse congregations across the country, which illuminate how the trends described by Putnam and Campbell affect the lives of real Americans.