Can Interfaith Dialogue Cure Religious Violence? [View all]
There are no easy answers here.
April 25, 2013
By Lucia Hulsether
In the wake of the Boston Bombings, Eboo Patel, public intellectual and director of the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), has proposed, in a recent article on HuffPo, that this explosive violence resulted partly from a failure of interfaith dialogue.
With the caveat that “interfaith programs are not a miracle solution,” he offers three ways that this work can help:
First, “interfaith helps harmonize people’s identities.” Patel goes on:
“In America, just about everyone is some sort of hyphenated hybrid of race, religion and ethnicity/nationality... Religious extremists try to separate people’s various identities and pit them against each other.”
Patel suggests that the Tsarnaev brothers might have been less vulnerable to extremism if they “had been involved in discussions with people from other backgrounds about how their faith identity was mutually enriching with their nationality and citizenship.”
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/7076/can_interfaith_dialogue_cure_religious_violence
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