Description
Book SynopsisDistinguished novelists, philosophers, historians, sociologists, and political scientists propose a new approach to settling multicultural tensions in the modern world.
Trade ReviewThe contributors to this volume open up fertile new ground exploring problems, hypotheses, and recommendations in provocative and original ways. Readers will find the fresh thinking exhibited in these pages eye-opening and mind-expanding. -- Hans Oberdiek, Swarthmore College Alfred Stepan and Charles Taylor have played a leading role in getting us to rethink the meaning of political secularism, above all to undermine the simplistic notions that secularism means an absolute separation of 'church and state,' that this is essential to democracy, and that there is only one institutional template for achieving a secular polity. In this collection of essays, they have assembled a set of contributors who look at the varied ways in which quite different societies, past and present, Western and non-Western, have tried to achieve multireligious coexistence and the role of the state in that process. This is just the kind of historical and theoretical inquiry we need as we work through the challenge of crafting a suitably multiculturalized set of secularisms. -- Tariq Modood, University of Bristol A welcome and felicitous addition to the vast literature on the subject. Journal of Church and State
Table of ContentsIntroduction, by Alfred Stepan and Charles Taylor Religion and the Imagination, by Salman Rushdie with Gauri Viswanathan Part 1. Classical Western Approaches to Toleration A Form of Liberty and Indulgence: Toleration as a Layered Institution, by Ira Katznelson How to Define Secularism, by Charles Taylor Secularism: Its Content and Context, by Akeel Bilgrami Half-Toleration: Concordia and the Limits of Dialogue, by Nadia Urbinati Part 2. Before and Beyond Classical Approaches to Toleration Beyond Toleration: Civility and Principled Coexistence in Asokan Edicts, by Rajeev Bhargava Empire and Toleration: A Comparative Sociology of Toleration Within Empire, by Karen Barkey Modernity, State, and Toleration in Indian History: Exploring Accommodations and Partitions, by Sudipta Kaviraj Muslims and Toleration: Unexamined Contributions to the Multiple Secularisms of Modern Democracies, by Alfred Stepan Contributors Index
