After Pluralism

March 22-24, 2007
After Pluralism convenes a multidisciplinary group of scholars from law, history, religion, anthropology, literature, and sociology, who question the categories of religion, pluralism, and secularism in a global range of contexts. The Keynote Panel on March 22 is open to the public via registration, and the Workshop on March 23-24 is by invitation only.

We will explore not only how religions relate to each across "pluralistic" boundaries, but also how religions have transformed each other, both historically and in the present.

Pluralism has been an important prescriptive model for recognizing and respecting religious difference in multicultural societies, but it has not fared as well as either a descriptive or analytical model. By tending to focus on "orthodox" religious institutions and individuals relating to each other across lines of difference, pluralism has obscured the range of diversity within religions, as well as the similar ways that religions have responded to and been changed by modernity.

Posing the question of what might come "after pluralism," this workshop will gather junior and senior scholars, including students, whose work shows that interreligious contact is often better characterized not by transactions across bounded orthodoxies, but by the interplay and friction of overlapping identities and communities in spheres not necessarily considered to be "religious," whether law, the media, or education.