Awareness Of Religious Diversity Research Articles

Social Interaction in Building Religious Tolerance in Sukabumi City Society

This study aims to determine the understanding of society, social interaction in building religious tolerance and the role of religious institutions in maintaining religious tolerance in the community of Sukabumi. This form of study is qualitative and based on fieldwork using three methods including phenomenological method, sociological method, and historical method. The results of this study found that: first, the understanding of the people of Sukabumi about tolerance reflects an attitude of respect and acceptance of religious diversity, culture, and views. They actively interact with diverse backgrounds, respect human rights, and encourage interfaith and cultural participation in community activities. This understanding creates an inclusive, harmonious, and peaceful coexistence environment, which makes Sukabumi an inspiring example in building a tolerant society. Social interaction between citizens of different religions and effective social communication have established a social contract that respects and respects religious rights. Sukabumi's achievement as the 6th tolerant city in Indonesia shows the commitment of the government and society in promoting the values of tolerance. Positive factors, such as government policies, inclusive education programs, and public awareness, contributed to this achievement. Through the iceberg models approach, researchers can understand how social interaction fosters harmony and awareness of religious diversity. Understanding and respect for religious diversity is the hallmark of Sukabumi that must be strengthened in order to be an example of harmony for a diverse Indonesia.

Changing Students’ Perceptions by Humanizing Dati Israelis through Comics

A qualitative practitioner research study was conducted with 31 high school students studying religion contemporary Israeli society. The purpose of the study was to understand how using cartoons written and illustrated by the religious Jewish-Israeli settler Shay Charka challenged students to think about religion in Israeli society in new ways and whether introducing perspectives that were foreign to their North American Jewish education led to new ways of relating to and understanding Jewish-Israeli communities. Results of this small-scale study yielded that the comics were successful in introducing new ways of thinking about religion and in introducing a more complex portrait of Israeli society. As a pedagogical device, comics proved to be of salience and interest to the learners, which also led students to be motivated to study them. Students were particularly interested in the ways that Charka subverted their assumptions of gender in religious-Israeli communities and this specifically led to increased awareness of religious diversity in Israeli society.

The Relations Between Religion and Politics in European Education Systems

This paper aims to discuss the role of religion in contemporary European education systems, especially in the realm of social rights. Classical social thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th century all thought that religion would either disappear or become progressively attenuated with the expansion of modern institutions. They understand modernization not to involve the actual disappearance of religion, but perhaps as attenuation and certainly as changing religious forms in relation to other institutions. Studies of the relationship between religion and education in Europe seem to adopt the view that the study of religion is a precondition for tolerance and social awareness of religious diversity, as well as a prerequisite for personal development and social responsibility. Religious education is perceived as part of ‘bildung’ and a presupposition of citizenship education in its broader sense. This position challenges the foundation stones of enlightenment thought as an attempt to distinguish between knowledge and faith or citizenship and congregation. Educational systems, the par excellence institutions of Modernity, represent an interesting example of the peculiar co-existence between tradition and Modernity in European societies. The implications of the persistence of religion within the institutions of Modernity are both epistemological and political. While the foundations of modern knowledge on reason are challenged in several aspects of school knowledge, fundamentalism, nationalism and social exclusion.

Religious Pluralism in Thirteen Theses

Thesis 1: In terms of our awareness of religions the world has become significantly smaller and each country significantly larger. Thesis 2: Both the factual presence and the awareness of religious diversity will continue to grow for an unforeseeable length of time. Thesis 3: The religious challenge of religious diversity emerges from the necessity to engage with the perception of different messages of salvation and corresponding truth claims. Thesis 4: For logical reasons there are only four basic options on how to interpret religious truth claims, and only three of them constitute religious options. Thesis 5: Prima facie religious diversity seems to support an atheist/naturalist interpretation of religion. Thesis 6: Exclusivism is the weakest of all possible options. Thesis 7: Compared to exclusivism, inclusivism is only half-hearted progress. Thesis 8: Pluralism avoids the weak points of the two alternative options and represents a worthy alternative to atheism. Thesis 9: Religious pluralism is not rel...

Does cognitive humility lead to religious tolerance? Reflections on Craig versus Quinn

We’ve all heard the familiar saying, “ignorance is bliss.” It may also be true that “ignorance is intolerant.” But it seems to be at least sometimes true that intolerance is produced by something else: overconfidence in the truthfulness of one’s own opinions. Awareness of and avoidance of such overconfidence may be a path towards tolerating those with whom one disagrees. And this could be true in religion as well as in other areas of belief. In his 2005 article “On Religious Diversity and Tolerance,” Philip L. Quinn argues that awareness of religious diversity, coupled with various other considerations, leads to a degree of modesty about the truth claims of one’s religion, and that such modesty leads to tolerance of other religions. However, in his 2007 paper “Is Uncertainty a Sound Foundation for Religious Tolerance,” William Lane Craig takes issue with Quinn’s position, arguing that Quinn’s “radical skepticism” about religious beliefs is not warranted and that “doubt” is not a sound foundation for tolerance. In this paper I contend that cognitive humility is warranted, that it is not a form of skepticism, that it does not entail doubt, and that it may contribute significantly to religious tolerance. I defend Quinn’s thesis by offering a version that is based on certain epistemic considerations that help the reader to see Quinn’s argument in a new and strengthened light. I then argue that Quinn’s approach to tolerance has at least one significant advantage over the approach proposed by Craig: acceptability to all religious traditions.

Dialogue Comes of Age: Christian Encounters with Other Traditions (review)

Reviewed by: Dialogue Comes of Age: Christian Encounters with Other Traditions John Berthrong Dialogue Comes of Age: Christian Encounters with Other Traditions. Edited by John B. Cobb Jr. and Ward M. McAfee. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010. 242 pp. My good colleague at Boston University, Peter Berger, often tells the following story about his long life work as a sociologist of religion. As a recently arrived young man from Vienna working on his doctorate at the New School he assumed that modernization meant radical secularization. The general secularization theories of the 1950s inevitably held that modernity meant the weakening or even the demise of the world's religions. As Berger now points out, not only do we encounter many forms of modernity in the contemporary world, but also the early secularization thesis has proved to be generally false. While it is true that, again as Berger ironically notes, secularism in the sense of the decline of organized religion has happened in northern, and to a lesser extent, central Europe and university faculty clubs around the world, religion has not only survived but is flourishing and is growing around the globe in a plethora of old and new forms. But Berger then notes that we can say one thing about modernity and its offspring of globalization: awareness of religious diversity is growing on every continent. Actually, modernity seems to mean a general awareness of diversity of which the growth of religions is only one facet. Books like the one ably edited by John B. Cobb Jr. and Ward M. McAfee help to substantiate Berger's insight into the role of religion in the modern world. Of course such a growing awareness of the diversity of religions brings new challenges, seen sometimes as a positive blessing and in other cases as something to cause anxiety. Among the variety of tasks a book about interreligious dialogue can achieve, the editors write that they have one special objective in mind: "We are asking a limited question. What can we, as progressive Christians, learn from our study of the history of the relations of Christianity with other traditions and from their unique wisdom? How can we help to reformulate the Christian faith in light of what we learn?" (p. 5). This seemingly simple question is actually much more complicated that it appears on a first reading. While limited, it is wonderfully expansive in its implications. First, it is doubtful that a book like this could have been written in the 1950s or even the 1970s for that matter. That it can be written now depends on a number of [End Page 143] features, both internal to the history of Christian theology and external factors having to do with global political, social, cultural, and economic transformations. For instance, there is a great deal of debate on how to mark the beginning of the contemporary Christian theological engagement in what is called interfaith or interreligious dialogue. In North America some scholars would suggest we look as far back as the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and its World's Parliament of Religions. For many Americans this was their first chance to meet articulate representatives of a number of world religions. Or moving into the twentieth century, other scholars will point to the theological breakthrough represented by the documents of Vatican II. For the first time in the modern world the Roman Catholic Church acknowledged that interfaith dialogue was a worthy task for the Christian community. The World Council of Churches did not lag far behind in establishing an office for interfaith dialogue in Geneva. Second, and even more specific to North America, great political changes helped to transform the religious landscape of Canada and the United States. In both countries exclusionary immigration laws were dramatically revised in the 1960s. Suddenly immigration from the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia recommenced after a long hiatus. The new immigrants brought with them their religions, and North America has become the home of a plethora of the religions of the world that simply were not present in any significant numbers prior to the 1970s. Of course, the major exception to this was and is the Jewish community, which...

Alston's epistemology of religious belief and the problem of religious diversity

In this paper I examine William Alston's work on the epistemology of religious belief, focusing on the threat to the epistemic status of Christian belief presented by awareness of religious diversity. I argue that Alston appears to misunderstand the epistemic significance of the ‘practical rationality’ of the Christian mystical practice. I suggest that this error is due to a more fundamental misunderstanding, regarding the significance of practical rationality, in Alston's ‘doxastic practice’ approach to epistemology; an error that leads to arbitrariness among the class of rational doxastic practices. I suggest how one might remedy this weakness, with an additional, epistemic, criterion that rational doxastic practices must satisfy.