Berkley Center

The Theologies and Practices of Religious Pluralism project convenes a team of international scholars to provide original insights on the transformations that globalization has forced upon all religions, challenging their theology and practices, reshaping their status in public spaces, and affecting international relations and daily life. It will start within the three major monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and in a second phase expand to encompass other faiths such as Buddhism and Hinduism. The project's interdisciplinary approach will examine pivotal issues within and across religious traditions by analyzing the following:

• How religious traditions respond to increasing social and religious diversity.
• What place is occupied by religious differences within each faith and the rank of truth that each religion acknowledges to the others. 
• The extent of engagement in missionary activities, dialogue, tolerance, and inclusion, as well as the tendencies toward the exclusion or rejection of otherness.
• The novel global condition whereby each religion claims to be unique and different, while at the same time defending its valid universal message for all of humanity, in a peculiar entanglement of universal particularisms and particular universalisms.

Berkley Center Senior Fellows José Casanova and Jocelyne Cesari co-chair the project. It is jointly led by Reset DOC and Reset Dialogues with support from the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, the University of Birmingham, the Foundation for Religious Sciences in Bologna and Palermo, and the Haifa Laboratory for Religious Studies. This research program and related results were made possible by the support of the NOMIS Foundation.