Encountering the Other: Christian and Multifaith Perspectives: 1 (Religious Pluralism and Public Life)

How do religious traditions create strangers and neighbors? How do they construct otherness? Or instead work to overcome it? In this exciting collection of interdisciplinary essays scholars and activists from various traditions explore these questions. Through legal and media studies they reveal how we see religious others. They show that Jewish Christian Islamic and Sikh texts frame others in open-ended ways. Conflict resolution experts and Hindu teachers they explain draw on a shared positive psychology. Jewish mystics and Christian contemplatives use powerful tools of compassionate perception. Finally the authors explain how Christian theology can help teach respectful views of difference. They are not afraid to discuss how religious groups have alienated one another. But together they choose to draw positive lessons about future cooperation.