The Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College lists an upcoming lecture: Religious Exclusivism and Pluralism as a Political Project (Boston College, March 14, 2012, at 5:30 PM). This lecture, by Miroslav Volf, professor at Yale Divinity School and founding director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, will explore the challenges of a world in which interfaith encounters are increasingly unavoidable.
It goes without saying that in the modern world—both within nations and in the global arena—persons of different religions encounter one another and interact, conduct politics, and do business more and more often, even as their beliefs express exclusive and universal validity. How, asks Professor Volf, do we then co-exist constructively in a pluralistic society of exclusivist faiths?
Please read the Boisi Center’s abstract of Professor Volf’s lecture, as well as its biography of the professor, after the jump. (Likewise, see this post on Volf’s recent book, A Public Faith, by CLR’s Professor Movsesian.)
Increasingly, people of diverse religious backgrounds live together under the same political roof. At the same time, many people embrace politically assertive and religiously exclusivist religions. One of the central questions of today is whether and to what extent it is possible for religious exclusivists to embrace pluralism as a political project.
Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School, and the founding Director for the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. His books include Allah: A Christian Response (2011); Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (2006); Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (1996); and After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (1998). He has been involved in international ecumenical dialogues (for instance, with the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity) and interfaith dialogues (on the executive board of C-1 World Dialogue), and is active participant in the Global Agenda Council on Values of the World Economic Forum. A native of Croatia, he regularly teaches and lectures in Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, and across North America. Volf earned a B.A. at Evangelical-Theological Faculty, an M.A. at Fuller Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. at University of Tübingen.