Podcast: What do Cats Have to do with Interfaith Work?
Domestic ‘Terrorism’ Depends on the Perpetrator
In the past years our country has witnessed a wave of domestic terrorist acts mainly perpetrated by white supremacists and right-wing extremists; not Islamist terrorists. Just to highlight a few of th... Read More
Methodological Challenges to Measuring Transformation
When I set out on my dissertation research, my main question was whether and how interfaith dialogue functions to transform people. I had a hypothesis that people do interfaith dialogue because when d... Read More
Can We Get Real? Authentic Interfaith Truth-Telling & the Burning of Black Churches
“Why does it take a tragedy to bring us all together?” Rev. Terry McCray Hill of Bethel AME Church in Portland, Oregon asked this question the day after the Charleston massacre. We gathere... Read More
Same-Sex Marriage and Slippery Slopes
In his dissent to the Supreme Court's landmark ruling on same-sex marriage, Chief Justice John Roberts offers a familiar 'slippery slope' argument. Slippery slope arguments offer a very narrow picture... Read More
Choice and Safety: Required Ingredients for Interfaith Progress
Classic “contact theory” predicts that diverse societies automatically bring about tolerance. I argued against this idea here when I discussed how proximity generally exacerbates the anxiety of di... Read More
Generalizations Are Never Defensible. Or Is This an Indefensible Generalization?
Figuring out how to talk about religion, especially in boundary crossing contexts, can be a struggle. Isn’t that part of what we are trying to do at State of Formation–figure out the how of in... Read More
Searching for the Buddha’s Climate Change Policy
On May 14, I joined some 130 Buddhist leaders, teachers and scholars representing over 60 major Buddhist schools and ethnicities in Washington D.C. for the first White House U.S. Buddhist Leaders Conf... Read More
Interfaith Dialogue with Those Who Belong to Exclusivistic, Literalistic Religions
When I read Jenn Lindsay’s recent State of Formation blog post entitled “On Irreconcilable Differences: My Interreligious Dialogue with Mormon Missionaries” I was immediately intrigu... Read More
What Is the Unity of “Unity in Diversity”?
Notwithstanding the prizing of diversity, there IS some unified bottom line to interfaith dialogue. Nonviolent behavior is the basis for “unity in diversity.” Behavior is a category about which a... Read More