19 books
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7 voters
Pluralism
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Human beings evolved to live in small bands with people more or less like themselves. But today, many of us live in wonderfully pluralistic societies. In America, Europe, India, and many other places, we're trying to build mass multicultural democracies, societies that contain people from diverse races and ethnicities, with different ideologies and backgrounds. To survive, pluralistic societies require citizens who can look across difference and show the kind of understanding that is a prerequis
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― How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
― How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
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The construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimilation of non-European peoples to European civilization. The idea that people's historical experience is inessential to them, that it can be shed at will, makes it possible to argue more strongly for the Enlightenment's claim to universality: Muslims, as members of the abstract category "humans," can be assimilated or (as some recen
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― Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity
― Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity