After Pluralism

The first volume to bring together scholars from a variety of fields whose work critically examines the genealogy of secularism and its relationship to pluralism, the potentially negative implications and underlying assumptions of tolerance, and the naturalized hegemony of the law vis-a-vis religion in liberal democracies. Taken as a whole, After Pluralism serves as a response and probably the most ambitious and influential effort to map out religious pluralism in the United States. -- Nathaniel Deutsch, University of California, Santa Cruz

The contributors to this volume treat pluralism as a concept that is historically and ideologically produced or, put another way, as a doctrine that is embedded within a range of political, civic, and cultural institutions. Their critique considers how religious difference is framed as a problem that only pluralism can solve. Working comparatively across nations and disciplines, the essays in After Pluralism explore pluralism as a "term of art" that sets the norms of identity and the parameters of exchange, encounter, and conflict. Contributors locate pluralism's ideals in diverse sites--Broadway plays, Polish Holocaust memorials, Egyptian dream interpretations, German jails, and legal theories--and demonstrate its shaping of political and social interaction in surprising and powerful ways. Throughout, they question assumptions underlying pluralism's discourse and its influence on the legal decisions that shape modern religious practice. Contributors do more than deconstruct this theory; they tackle what comes next. Having established the genealogy and effects of pluralism, they generate new questions for engaging the collective worlds and multiple registers in which religion operates.