The contributors to this volume treat pluralism as a concept that is historically and ideologically produced or, put another way, as a doctrine that is embedded within a range of political, civic, and cultural institutions. Their critique considers how religious difference is framed as a problem that only pluralism can solve. Working comparatively across nations and disciplines, the essays in After Pluralism explore pluralism as a "term of art" that sets the norms of identity and the parameters of exchange, encounter, and conflict. Contributors locate pluralism's ideals in diverse sitesBroadway plays, Polish Holocaust memorials, Egyptian dream interpretations, German jails, and legal theoriesand 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 shape 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.
Price: $36.00
Pages: 352
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Series: Religion, Culture, and Public Life
Publication Date:
02 November 2010
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780231152334
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
RELIGION / Comparative Religion, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology of Religion
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.
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 Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity.
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
