Berkley Center

At this event, K. Anthony Appiah analyzed moral and political disputes across and within nations complicated by religious factors. Part of the reason, Appiah argued, is the centrality of religious identities to ethical identity and the psycho-sociological difficulties of changing. This informs the Enlightenment view that, where possible, we should tolerate (not convert) those of other religions and refrain from using controversial religious claims in political argument. Here the real divides are not between one religion and another, but between what might be loosely (and perhaps unhelpfully) called fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist forms of religiosity. Developing non-fundamentalist responses to fundamentalist tendencies requires detailed engagement with the particulars of a tradition. This is made easier if there is an ongoing, respectful, cosmopolitan conversation between adherents of different religious traditions. The paper on which this lecture was based was included in the edited book Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics (2008).