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Zusatztext This is a work of great substance and commitment, drawing atypically from a broad range of human experience and intellect. It is a living seminar on the possibilities of human understanding and the potential for living together in more peaceful ways despite the seemingly insurmountable differences even among the best-intentioned people. It is a brilliant tour de force, offering conceptualizations and categorizations that defy much of the present-day ways in which the problem of pluralism is understood. Informationen zum Autor Adam B. Seligman is a Professor of Religion at Boston University. A respected scholar in civil society and community engagement, he has authored or edited more than two dozen books. He has taught at universities in the United States, Israel, Japan and Hungary, where he was a Fulbright Fellow from 1990 to 1992.Prof. Seligman founded the International Summer School on Religion and Public Life in Sarajevo in 2001 and facilitated its growth into Communities Engaging with Difference and Religion (CEDAR). He has received the prestigious Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize in 2020 for his work. Klappentext The authors argue that resorting to rules and categories cannot adequately address the pervasive problems of ambiguity, difference, and boundaries - that is, the challenge of pluralism in our world. They show that alternative, more particularistic modes of dealing with ambiguity through ritual and shared experience may attune more closely with contemporary problems of living with difference. Zusammenfassung How can we order the world while accepting its enduring ambiguities? Rethinking Pluralism suggests a new approach to the problem of ambiguity and social order, which goes beyond the default modern position of 'notation' (resort to rules and categories to disambiguate). The book argues that alternative, more particularistic modes of dealing with ambiguity through ritual and shared experience better attune to contemporary problems of living with difference. It retrieves key aspects of earlier discussions of ambiguity evident in rabbinic commentaries, Chinese texts, and Greek philosophical and dramatic works, and applies those texts to modern problems. The book is a work of recuperation that challenges contemporary constructions of tradition and modernity. In this, it draws on the tradition of pragmatism in American philosophy, especially John Dewey's injunctions to heed the particular, the contingent and experienced as opposed to the abstract, general and disembodied. Only in this way can new forms of empathy emerge congruent with the deeply plural nature of our present experience. While we cannot avoid the ambiguities inherent to the categories through which we construct our world, the book urges us to reconceptualize the ways in which we think about boundaries - not just the solid line of notation, but also the permeable membrane of ritualization and the fractal complexity of shared experience. Inhaltsverzeichnis Acknowledgements Introduction Ch. 1: The Importance of Being Ambiguous Interlude: Ambiguity, Order and the Deity Ch. 2: Notation and its Limits Interlude: The Israelite Red Heifer and the Edge of Power in China Ch. 3: Ritual and the Rhythms of Ambiguity Interlude: Crossing the Boundaries of Empathy Ch. 4: Shared Experience Interlude: Experience and Multiplicity Conclusion References Cited ...
