(00:00:00) I'm very happy and proud. To introduce Martin E Marty as this year's low lecture. I have long admired Martin Marty is a sure-footed guide through some very Rocky and confusing terrain namely religion the field of religion in American Life. According to an old rabbinic Legend before the fall Adam Adam and Eve were very tall. They were in fact tall enough so that they could hear the Angels Sing. But after the fall all Humanity gradually shrunk and stature so that very few Giants were left. One of the Giants remaining in the field of religion a religion in American life is without doubt Martin E Marty. Those of us who have profited from his work associate him with other Giants in the field who have for many years had such an impact on the theological landscape persons like Paul tillich Rhino neighbor H. Richard neighbor called a neighbor Albert out, ler and others Martin Marty at one time was a colleague of tillich at the University of Chicago a very close friend of Albert out. Ler and an associate of the neighbors. Those associations surely have greatly enriched his own work as I'm sure he would be the first to say and his own native intellect have been combined with those associations to bear on religion in American Life. He now serves as the editor of the senior editor of the Christian Century the most important popular theological voice in America today. In 1972. He was the winner of the national book award for his book The Righteous (00:02:11) Empire. (00:02:13) He is the holder of 36 honorary degrees the honor the author of 40 books. And the author of a four-volume set modern American religion whose second volume the noise of conflict 1919 to 1941 will appear imminently. He is currently the director of a very ambitious fundamentalism project an international study funded by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. All of this these rather impressive credentials are really not too bad for a country boy from West Point, Nebraska. We're very pleased and proud to have Martin Marty Hazard 1990 low lecture whose address is entitled religious diversity the limits and challenges of pluralism. Please join me in welcoming. Dr. Marty. Thank you dear friends. Historian start with stories. Here's a story 1979 the inauguration of a new president at Trinity University in San Antonio, and I was invited to give a lecture on the humanities. In honor of his inauguration and then for College University presidents were to respond. I did the best I could being a very provincial Westerner describing some of the values that I thought were associated with the study of humanities language Linguistics law anthropology religion philosophy literature history spun it all out and then came the responses and the first two were Genie a little responses, but the third was President Harry Smith of Boston College, theologically informed and thus devastating and said that Marty had really blown his chance because he represents that among the humanities which necessarily must deal with the whole world. He is in a faculty where people are studying Hinduism and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity and all their various dimensions. And you simply can't talk religion unless you get into its Rich pluralism its diversity its tentacles. It's stings. It's attached to and he said Marty had pretty well restricted himself to the west and Overlook all the other such diversities. After that, the fourth president was to respond. It was John Silber who was in the news as candidate for Senate in Massachusetts and is an alumnus of Trinity and local Boy made good and president of Boston coming down for the occasion and all he did was get up and say this morning and mr. Marty's lecture. We had he said brilliant defense of individualism and freedom and all these Western humanistic values. Now my colleague Harry Smith says that we have a lot to learn that we have a lot to learn from Buddhism Hinduism and Islam which I take it means 1979 the we have a lot to learn from Ayatollah Khomeini, and he sat down as was his wont. I want to unpack that a little bit several things happened. Relevant to the topic. First of all, I had to have some contemporary Reverend reference. So, you know, this is potentially relevant at least and John Silber is the Contemporary reference. Second I did sneak in that I spoke in a setting where for College University presidents responded to me. That's a little way of saying I'm kind of a big deal the way the introduction of as a roetzel suggested then I have taken right back by saying but I was also a friend of the new president which is probably why I got invited which take some of it back. It suggests the limits any of us bring to a topic like this. There is no way someone who studies a little corner of the West can possibly speak with true information about the inner life of people worlds away in Islam Buddhism Hinduism or even the many different branches of Judaism and Christianity. So we have our limits in our perceptions of pluralism. In the case of what? President sober said we also see something about today's topic on the limits of pluralism to speak of the West for many people means that's our world and we should know it and efforts made by colleges like this to bring in and to reach out to other (00:07:18) cultures (00:07:19) ethnic racial religious groups is not only frustrating but undercutting perhaps of the values of the West and presidents over as some of you may know is involved in a very intense debate in American colleges and universities over just how this should be done. And under it all my main theme for today. It suggests that if you do want to study cultural diversity West and the rest of the world, you will very soon bump into an extremely volatile. Topic of religion. That's where we are. My assignment is to talk about pluralism because Macalester College is always wrestling with that because the Metropolis like this is a place of ever increasing diversity and must come to terms with it and American society where the majority of you and I live is also experiencing. (00:08:18) puzzling and promising diversities and pluralism (00:08:24) and the religious dimension of it is often overlooked though, I would argue. It's probably the most tense of them all. Pluralism religious pluralism is a part of a mix racial ethnic religious and cultural. Back to 1979 right after the revolution that made the Ayatollah Khomeini. So well known in American life that you could use it in a reference the way they did in, San Antonio. Admiral Stansfield Turner was interviewed on the program issues and answers February 4th 1979. If you want to look it up and he was asked how his he was then director of it CIA had totally missed this revolution. It was coming our way. We were backing the shot to the last minute. We were overlooking the power of Shiite Islamic fundamentalism, and it's militant phases. We missed all that and Admiral Turner said, well, we did what we had always done. We paid attention to everything going on in Iran class structure banking University life Cinema culture of every sort. The only thing we didn't pay any attention to his religion because everyone knew it had no power in the modern world. And of course it was religion that did Us in there and is at so many of these (00:09:44) junctures. pluralism (00:09:48) pluralism looking up in the dictionary can mean many different things discussion of pero universes usually associated with philosophy William James and others who talk about meta physically weather behind the universe. It is one or many but the pluralism of which we are speaking and which Americans are debating. These years is a somewhat more matter-of-fact kind of term. It's not a term in which most of us have to make up our minds as to whether the universe is finally one or many we just have to deal with the empirical reality that which we see and touch that there are an awful lot of different kinds of people's around us and we're one of them I was introduced as that kid from Nebraska and I have a biography not too different. I suppose from other people in this room and that the world you grow up in the first 12 years of your life or so looks like the normal world. I thought looking out the window that everybody was white Catholic Lutheran or Methodist the world stop there and I could read that there were other people out there, but the normal world was that now where I live in Chicago that world that I grew up in when described is an Arcane bizarre remote kind of anthropological Zoo as far as everyone is concerned and I learned there is no the (00:11:11) normal (00:11:13) we all go through that. That's the experience of the shock of pluralism which forces us to engage in some setting of limits around ourselves. So the pluralism I'm talking about here is that matter of fact kind of thing that could be reduced to some almost colloquial Expressions such as quote any number can play. Which is the rule of the game in America and many do play which is the reality of American life the way it turned out and third that you have to have a policy for it. If you want to have play you have to have rules of the game and our Constitution and many other supportive measures that are to be correlates of it are about it and forth you have to have a practice. So any number can play a great number do There are rules of the game and we're doing it it has never been easy. When we look back at good old days when it seems to be simpler. It usually was so because we didn't yet know that the little worlds we grew up in where only part of the reality around us. In recent years we have often had pictured to us that America in the past was coherent. simple during the Reagan years. It was often portrayed as Norman Rockwell's world the world in which grandma and grandpa had lived in which the Little Red Schoolhouse and the Little White Church steeple towered over the little village life in which everybody lived for the book just mentioned 1919 to 1941 the prime years of Norman Rockwell I decided that I wanted to use an illustration of Iraq well cover or artwork to suggest that religious dimension of that simpler America because religion always comes up in these debates. I checked 320 Norman Rockwell religion covers. Not one had a religious reference. 34 Christmas ones it changes in the 50s 50s and 60s. We got more religious not less. So before World War Two. 34 Christmas covers have not a single religious reference their dickensian. People are singing carols. They're drinking a lot of a oh, they're knocking on windows. They're doing all these things but there's never even a church steeple or anything of that sort. It's an image. We create of Simplicity. We forget that those decades weren't just that they were the Decades of the revived Ku Klux Klan and immigration restriction and father Coughlin wet versus dry and women versus men in black versus white and North versus South and fundamentalist versus modernist and Zionist versus anti-zionist and everybody mad at everybody else because they were fighting over the emerging pluralism. 1654 New Netherland New Amsterdam Harbor in comes a ship and Auditors and Jews (00:14:16) from (00:14:17) Spain kicked out in 1492 move to the Netherlands to Brazil throwing out there and 1/4. Stop is New York Governor Peter Stuyvesant and wires home take six months to the Dutch West Indies company in Amsterdam and says, what are we going to do? This is a Dutch reformed Colony. We want homogeneity. We want one not many and here comes a ship in their Jews on it. And you know what happens then soon we will have Lutheran's and Catholics and minimalists. There are rumors that some are here already. It is the first classic statement of a great American phrase. Damn it. There goes the neighborhood. The Dutch West Indies company wires back six months later. You will keep them. There were Jews investing in the Dutch West Indies company old Amsterdam was one of the more tolerant places in Europe and these Jews speaking several languages being at home in the economies of several cultures were enhancements for Young (00:15:28) Manhattan, but (00:15:31) what Stuyvesant was worried about still haunts people if you have no limits to pluralism if you have just many don't you have chaos? John Jay the overlooked third author of The Federalist Papers in the second Federalist Paper does 200 years old said one of the reasons we can take such risks with this free Constitution, which we're selling you for ratification is that we know it's going to work because we're all like each other we don't have to have laws here that says that say how to get along because we are finally one people of one ancestry with one language and one religion. Well, that was already its own Norman Rockwell over simplification of what was going on the women weren't mentioned the slaves were two thirds of a person in the counting. The Native Americans were treated as another nation and the religious groups were hardly one. Even if the majority of them still had an English ancestry. And so we have been working 1654 and 1789 down to the present with efforts to make sense of this. And most Americans welcome the struggle even if it is sometimes inconveniencing. consider the alternatives the Alternatives tend to be either totalitarian societies where secularly or new religiously Or as in Iran of $17.99 one religiously you impose limits to pluralism in the effort to make everything be but one in anyone who's been in any such place as a dissenter or in the minority or coerced to be in the majority knows that that is spiritually devastating that human Freedom the First Freedom James Madison (00:17:23) calls, it is lost (00:17:25) not to think about it at all though. Does mean that you live in the midst of chaos. You haven't even a name for the forces with which we have to work (00:17:33) every day. And so (00:17:36) people where I work as someone who's devoting his life to the study of pluralism are always looking for these models by which the two intersect. e pluribus unum the national motto Out of many one originally really refer just to Thirteen Colonies becoming one nation but analogically and metaphorically it applies to so much else and the authors of the Federalist Papers themselves started doing that. We are always in the process of dealing with our mini tennis without wanting to let go of that we are somehow also (00:18:13) necessarily one Aristotle. (00:18:18) 40 minutes 40 seconds. I'm into this and I'm from University of Chicago and haven't mentioned Aristotle. So I did now Aristotle. Is our great mentor because he looked off and said Plato once Society to be in Unum a one everything must finally cohere in that one. But he said that's not the police. That's not the human City. (00:18:43) That's a suppression of others. (00:18:47) the civitas or the (00:18:48) police (00:18:50) also is not merely atomized individuals all of them out there with no coherence has no he said the police the city is made up of (00:19:03) aggregates. Coalescence has sub groups of people (00:19:10) a great Dutch calvinist political philosopher whose influence my own thought more than the other people I mentioning here. I think Johannes El trousias said Society the polis the civitas the human City. The Republic is a community task minute atum. It is a community of communities. Some of our energy have to go into the one the limits of pluralism and some tube guaranteeing the Integrity of the sub (00:19:38) communities. (00:19:40) Edmund Burke for the historical and Anglo conservatives in our midst use the word platoons the little platoons that stand between you and the great Leviathan. They are the ins the weigh stations between Nebraska solid system one of a kindness and being swallowed up by the oppressive whole that he feared the French Revolution was propagating. We are little book Tunes where little companies I like to argue that the liberal arts college in a sense is one of these platoons where people can kind of know each other somewhere between being in isolation and being in a mass group. James Madison called infections interests in Federalist Paper 10 and 51 property groups and religious groups are both mentioned as factions and interests the somehow become part of the Great Republic. He wanted a large Republic because he thought there were more freedoms and he said don't worry that much about these subgroups these sub communities these little sectors because they'll cancel each other out. They'll take care of each other if one of them gets too assertive and yet the issuer freedoms along the way. 60 years later Alexis de tocqueville came on the scene and said in a Society Pure equality. Everything can be evened out and you can lose freedoms that way but in America the best thing that's happening is the development of what he called (00:21:05) associations (00:21:07) voluntary societies as you all know this greatest philosopher visitor to America saw the tremendous role of religion in assuring freedoms along the way because these religions he thought were not of the highly militant type they were little more like each other than he thought they ought to be for that matter, but they were places where people got their separate identities and integrity's with some concern for the hole. And one more illustration to show that the struggle goes on into 20th century in a wrong Court decision. Wrong because the court itself repealed it a few years later. Scary thought in 1940 Justice Felix Frankfurter said a right thing. That The Binding force of a free Society lies in the cohesion of public sentiment which he says is propagated through the various agencies of Mind and Spirit the pass on the traditions and create the new what all these must have been seven thinkers are about is the issue that the low committee this year asked me to address how in a campus setting and a metropolitan setting a national setting we can do justice ever more to the pluralism that keeps growing around us. While doing Justice to some measure of that. We are also necessarily somehow one if we have no (00:22:43) Oneness. (00:22:46) No common Universe of discourse. No common goals. We are the jungle. We do fall apart. If we have an enforced Oneness, we will not have the freedoms that make the rest (00:23:00) worthwhile. (00:23:03) So part 2 who cares and how do we care? We care as individuals. Doubt whether anybody except perhaps the sponsoring committee with their worries about the guest speaker woke up this morning worrying about the challenges of pluralism or put it that way most of us don't every morning consult the st. Paul and Minneapolis Yellow Pages under the category of churches to go shopping for Alternatives and you wouldn't even find most of them are you'd have to read the reader or wherever else all the ads are for all the Alternatives they get down to about as few as one religion per person in the end. My second attempt at relevance is suggested in my constant pursuit of pluralism. I spent an evening to three years ago with American Theologian Shirley MacLaine who was describing that she was God, but I was too and we should listen to our inner voice and while things are connected still finally, we each create our own reality which we did a few dozen times that night. And at one time when she said I'm God and I create all the way out of there is and I think all my own thoughts and they only have to make sense to me. I said as an old philosophical word for that, it's solid sysm said, how do you spell it? That's great. That's what I want. That's not really how we normally put our day together starting absolutely from scratch deciding what our identity is going to be that day. And what our choices will be and where we're going. We carry We Carry in us our histories are stories. They're part of us. You can fight them all your life. You can transform them. You can be born again. You can make certain kinds of changes you can convert but something of the story is there. Ortega says tell me your landscape and I'll tell you who you are. If I start visiting with you and your from Nigeria your Morocco Japan. I don't reduce you. You're still as Rich a human being as before, but I begin to know something of your language of discourse. So each of us is somehow involved in transcending mere solids is Amir aloneness in the world, but I have a hunch. We also are taking some pains to push back efforts to force us into some single mold. And so we live in sub-communities. With the double interest of our identity and our relation if I have no identity if I'm not part of an aggregate of sub-community and agency and Association of platoon or anything. I don't know whom to trust. I don't know what the gestures mean that come my way. Are they threatening? Are they beckoning until someone teaches me as I go to a new (00:25:58) culture? (00:26:00) That someone will say oh that isn't done around here. (00:26:05) I (00:26:05) won't know whether I'm involved in a revolutionary Act of doing something that isn't done around here or whether I'm choosing to conform. We need it for identity, but we need it for (00:26:16) relation because very few (00:26:19) are the people who live utterly contained only in their little identity group. It takes tremendous effort to do that in America groups the try with great integrity like the Amish, you know can't have Autos can't have television. It is a very strenuous demand to keep out signals from other groups, which can lure can threaten can overwhelm and the liberal arts college I would argue is one of those places where people say we are going to stress both The identity of the place of the discourse that makes possible a curriculum and common life and we want to honor. The separate identities the Aggregates from which people come. Bringing the two together is not easy. Picture being in my business for example a historian of American religion one has a certain nv4. societies that had one religion When I deal with my medieval colleagues or dealt with them 30 years ago when the rule or image was out the medieval Society was all that United. I used to Envy them a little bit because they knew what the church was. There was only the church and I start with 222 in the yearbook. They're all split down the middle like gives you 444 to start with 1,200 in the encyclopedia and all the rest of the Yellow Pages. It is very hard to find the (00:27:53) plot. (00:27:57) Nowadays, we know that the Middle Ages weren't that neat either like Norman Rockwell's World. There was a lot of diversity and people smuggled in other gods and plain brown wrappers and did their own thing with relics or whatever. So you had a kind of an official symbolic religion here and all those other things. There's always pluralism where there's any measure of freedom. But I think that the social scientist the humanist the historian has a little different problem in trying to tell the story of the mall. Then the rest of us do in active living with all of them. And so we look at a world in which this pluralism is. ever more visible and perhaps more intense Harold Isaac some years ago began a book titles of the tribe a sentence a memorize and slightly paraphrase around the world. There is a massive convulsive in gathering of people's into their separateness has and over against mrs. To protect their pride and power and place from the real presumed threats of other people are protecting their pride and power and place. That's the plot of the late 20th century or the end of the second Millennium not first world second world third world but first and second and third and any other number of Worlds made up of enormous varieties, I clip these things. It was only two years ago that we had this image that the Soviet Union was a Unum in Plato sense with a lot of force a single philosophy and a single Authority. I was in the Soviet Union the summer and had a hard time finding that Luna Matt all 72 years didn't begin to suppress these separate identities and the pluralism reading article last week about Kazakhstan. I don't think I knew it was in the map two years ago second-largest Republican the Soviet Union a million square miles big as all the rest of Eastern Europe outside the Soviet Union and there in Kazakhstan are a hundred twenty nationalities. Not the sort that usually get along with each other. In addition to Russians and kazakhs kazakhs are 39 percent in Russian 37% There are Volga Germans chechens ingush Captain's polled Kurds Koreans Armenians. Azerbaijanis, Georgians. Ukrainians Chinese gods whose Beck's uyghurs caracal packs tajiks, according to the Mufti of Kazakhstan. There are 23 traditionally Muslim nationalities, representing 10 million Muslims this astonishing mixture there 50 nationalities in the much larger Russian Republic. How did it get there by force the tragic Legacy of Stalin's regime when it was The Dumping Ground for the persecuted minorities. It's part of the gulag archipelago, but say all the students have it the Kazakh people have been exceptionally welcoming to the various ethnic groups. their cities of alma-ata and others are described as God's cruelest trick ugly mining cities without a tree in sight a lot of barbed wire till very recently, but somehow in the unfree world the same thing happens and now suddenly there's a beginning of a freedom and all these groups. Now have to deal with the challenge of pluralism. Not a hopeful one the morning after azerbaijanis and Armenians religio National cultural and so on are at each other (00:31:32) in what ways religion (00:31:33) relevant to this pluralism because I have described these as ethnic groups, even though many of them are Islamic and some of them are (00:31:38) Orthodox. Some are Jewish. (00:31:43) Religion is relevant in some cases. It's kind of a casual. Corollary. It's a leftover its nominal lives on in the name or Epi phenomenal. Everything else. Is there in religion is just one more thing tagged on some analyses. For example of the Protestant Catholic tensions in Northern Ireland have this character that they're deep economic historical things and the real Catholic church and much of the real Protestant church are working toward Concord, Nobel Prize winners were some women from Catholic and Protestant churches who were working out of the core of those churches for Concord while the people out there killing each other are called Catholic and Protestant, but many of them at least on the Catholic side. There is one partisan fundamentalist group Ian Paisley's but the larger Church of Ireland, so on are very different sort. So sometimes it's just one more element instead of a root (00:32:38) Factor. (00:32:40) In others it is a deeper identification that is in order to make sense of the mix. It's something we have to include and that's why I like always thinking hyphenated terms. It is racial - ethnic - religion - National - cultural they come as a mix and you can't pull them apart. You might leave the profession of the religion, but you're still haunted by it or maybe Jews in this room who are non-observant or their parents were non-observant and yet you are of a tradition in which you can retrieve go back and often a younger generation picks up what the older one had let slip So it is one element in the mix for many others. It is the Motive Power. Whatever grievances in the Iranian cities led to the revolution against the Shah. And whatever other factors economic and cultural were present we do have to say that here is clearly an instance where religion was the Motive Power. And in the Iranian Iraq war when Iranian mothers would see their tenant 12 year old Sons formed human chains to walk across land Mine Fields. So the Army's later could fight without the things knowing her son would be killed. She didn't love that son less than an American parent would she was a part of a religious Universe in which the son goes to Paradise that day is part of a Jihad and her tears will be lifelong but for her Redeemed by the fact that she's part of this larger cause and therefore it was religion not laban's realm not space not economy, which was fundamental. But beyond all of these I would say that religion enters in in that it is a big part of the name. We put on the reality around us. I'm not sure we even would always use the word religion references made in the introduction of Paul tillich who spoke of ultimate concern that is there is something bigger than any other thing that you live for die for Name by pass on. Someone else speaks of religion as the pictures we paint about the real reality. The anthropological definition that prevails in our time of Clifford Gertz that it is a system of symbols that in a sense provides long-standing moods and motivations among people until it creates an hour effectivity. More real than the real world. In the Hebrew scriptures though. He slay me yet will I trust in him? Well death is about as close as anything to you and you can't get much deeper than that when the Christian world. Nothing shall separate us from the love of God including death. And all the powers if you really believe that then malignant tumors. And the death of a spouse or a child. Or the loss of security are less real than that reality. And a lot of people who are or think of themselves as secular or doing that all the time with some other version of the same reality. So we have all of these clusters in the unfree world of Kazakhstan and the Free World like our own. Peter Berger wrote a book a few years ago called the heretical imperative reminding us that the Greek word High rhesus by the word heresy means to choose we all are in the process of choosing third contemporary relevance some years ago. Minnesotans were looked at by sociologists the most extensive state survey of religious opinion ever out of which issued a book called faith and ferment and they wanted some non minnesotans to come in on it. So sister Joan chidester and I wrote a book about it and Newsweek did a page about it and somewhere in a throwaway line that I hadn't even noticed. I said minnesotans to for all their Rich traditional Heritage has when they approached them as Catholics if they agree with the Pope fine. If not, they go their own way instead of developing a pick and choose Christianity which in the Greeks would have called heresy pick and choose their big headline and a few months later. The Pope's speech is startled by pick and choose Christianity came over to America talk about pick and choose Christianity and I got to find a speech writer because all Life you hope that some term you invent will make it into the Canon Peter Berger has so many mediating structures and other than I pick and choose. But now you might remember it as I image of what is involved when we busily make our way in the challenge of pluralism with the limits of pluralism. What do we do? Some people say simply ignore it Coast where a secular society religion is a private Affair and you can get by and many elements of a curriculum commercial life of a metropolis the way a nation works. You really can Coast a lot. But if you only Coast you're not ready for 1979 and the Iranian Revolution, you're not ready for the reality of Eastern Europe of today. You're not going to make sense of a lot of political battles in America. You aren't going to find ways to coexist with the neighbor and so the world of Higher Learning the world of intellectuals and literary figures and politics are having to pay more attention not less to religion in the modern world. Simply because you can't take for granted the homogeneities the Oneness. Is that had been there. For others pluralism is not a challenge. It's what I call mere pluralism. We acknowledge that it's there. Walt Whitman was our great mirror pluralist this he celebrated isn't it? Wonderful all this stuff out there and his poems are just gorgeous catalogs of all the things we are do I contradict myself? Well, I contradict myself. He says I'm neither for nor against institutions. He says all the way just absorbing as he thought America did all of this diversity and that's part of who we are and what we have to be if we don't ignore it. for others we deal with what I call utter pluralism we go all the way and celebrate it starts by saying jeez are a lot of things out there. I did that with a yearbook in the encyclopedia and the Yellow Pages already this morning, man is a lot of stuff out there and sure nice that there's a lot of stuff out there let a thousand flowers grow and let them all go along their own ways. and that's I think the way most Americans would like to do it as we get ever more complex and then things come along the don't let (00:39:28) us get away with it (00:39:30) the great theorist on this subject some years ago the late John Courtney Murray, Jesuit thinker wrote a book called we hold these truths said but when a troubling issue comes to the Republic We can no longer live in these incommensurate universes of discourse talking separate languages. We have to quote go up higher into some realm of common discourse. I think he made it easier that it is some metaphysics or theology or ethics or whatever I think as a Thomas to Catholic. A natural law advocate he thought there would be some way in which all people reason could be reason into that. We find it doesn't work that way or that even the people who do invoke natural law disagree with each other on what it means. So it isn't that easy, but he certainly right in the notion that when something troubles you have to find some way to transact between the groups. whether to form coalition's and alliances and Counting expense to your subgroup. Or warding off the worst thing from other groups or just trying to build a good society, which there are still some Americans who care about (00:40:47) so ignoring it (00:40:51) merely seeing it utterly wallowing in it don't seem to be finally satisfying and so we talked about the limits of pluralism, which I hope you can tell from my presentation there never be coercive. The First Amendment of the Constitution and the American tradition says these things have to move by persuasion not coercion. To give the government the state the instrument of determining is always a dangerous thing. You can see how tricky it is the Supreme Court last year took away the religious rights of the Native American Church, which for decades if not centuries had chewed peyote seeds as their Sacrament. They didn't take wine away from Christians, but they took the pill deceit away from Native Americans and liberal and conservative religionists. Alike are very nervous about that one. Because how you giving someone the power to say what's good and what's bad (00:41:45) in pluralism of religions (00:41:48) a tougher one for most people would be the twitchell case. in a Boston Court where a Christian Science family practicing what in their sub-community their Association Their aggregate their platoon was the truth the faith that which was more factual than the factuality of the Medical Institution on the bach didn't resort to Medical Care and their son died and the court says they are guilty of manslaughter and if that survives in Supreme Court level testing major American religion Christian Science will be hemmed in I don't want to solve either of those and we will have a short enough question period today that if you ask more about it, I won't even get to answer them and presenting them as an illustration of the Troublesome Ness. If you are in any of these communities, but the troubling it does to anybody who values both the life of a child in the freedom of a group. You have these competitive things so we don't really get by forever not thinking about it over against ignoring or mere or utter. I want to close now by some reference to a clue from John Courtney Murray the Devotion to what I then call Civic or civil pluralism, which doesn't try to solve the final questions of the truth of human life and doesn't settle for mere chaos. For most of us, especially if we are religious or theological informed it means we do have to struggle with the one in the mini it much of the most exciting theology in the part of the religious world that I hang out with Christian theology these days in the Christian Jewish encounter, especially but increasingly in the Christian Buddhist encounter deals with how do I handle the one truth? I know for the Christian in Christ with another Covenant of which I'm a part the Jew or a CO Humanity & Co religiosity with the Buddhist. Thirty years ago when the model was only integration racial and others or ecumenism very good models, by the way in a world where everybody was everybody's (00:43:59) throat. The (00:44:02) people being integrated started asking on what terms is this to happen? The great black novelist James Baldwin for example said you want to integrate me. You want to integrate me into this white Society. Are you sure I want to be integrated into a burning house. What is would say and I think the women's movement got started this way. Don't just bring me into the structures as they are but ask who I am and what women bring or whatever that's true of all the groups. We have to be conscious of that. I think we have to put energy into assuring that the polity we have is kept. And threats to that come from both sides fine paper some Years Ago by Professor Paul Weber, the University of Louisville on James Madison said three things went on in the religious side of our cultural diversity in the First Amendment. It says you can't establish a religion (00:44:58) Congress can't (00:45:03) The corollaries of that are that you can't give privilege to a specific religion. Legally on terrifically physically, you can't say the judeo Christian or the Christian or the whatever but also coming at it from the other side the Civil Society cannot use the religion of a group. As a disability, you can't say you can't form your ethics on the basis of it. Fourth relevancy some years ago. I was on that. One hour long certification four times as long as any Warhol allows celebrity the Phil Donahue show, which is barely remembered today, but used to be big when President Reagan said that 1983, I think it was was to be the year of the (00:45:50) Bible (00:45:52) and he went all Americans to read the Bible behind him was the Seal of the Republic and mr. Donahue figuring. I would Reagan bash invited me on got somebody from Billy Graham's Camp figuring he would defend it got somebody from the ACLU and got an irrelevant fourth person who had nothing to contribute and we all played the game of surprising him. The ACLU man was a southern baptist Minister, which absolutely through. Mr. Donohue figured ACLU had to be raw atheism instead of born-again Bible believer. And I chose to defend mr. Reagan some time in eight years. I had to agree with him and that day I said he had a perfect right to do that. It was on his own time. He can't help the decor behind him and said seal the president the US they could have moved the camera. But it I mean my office wall has some things I like to have show when the people elected him. They knew he would do those things. They could have like somebody who says it's the year of the Quran or the Kama Sutra or anything else. It's a package deal. Why is President doesn't overdo it and our presidents don't overdo it but they are not expected to leave their roots of their ethical system at the door Congress passed a law that said 1983 was the year of the Bible and given time I would have thought we would have thought that constitutionally because I don't think it had the right to do that. I'm sure would have been overturned constitutionally because it would be establishing a privileging a specific Faith but a private individual or any caucus group can draw upon its thing that's good for the health of the pluralism I would argue. But I think we are these days is and I need to understand the (00:47:40) encounter with the other (00:47:44) and sometimes in our search for our separate identities. We forget that the separate identities are in the world in order to assure the deepest things. the neighbor The Stranger very often represents an encounter out of which I can grow if we both allow it to happen. I have what I call the 1.5 rule in (00:48:09) religion (00:48:11) 19th century. They said Brian really gion can't they're kind of really gion can't who knows only one religion knows no religions. So you kind of have to know your way around more than one even to know what you're about. But if you go deep enough you start meeting others there and the great people of our Century, I think do that. Martin buber was very Jewish and at home with European existentialism. John XXIII was quite Catholic. (00:48:41) Most Pope's are (00:48:44) and when the Jews came in. To his chamber he got off the throne and said I am Joseph your brother Thomas Merton was talking to Buddhist monks today. He died and he needed Jesus king needed satyagraha Etc. You could take all the deeps. They are very deep in their tradition and their access to the truth and the Unum and out of some generosity of spirit try to move their group so they can learn from the other. Which is why I think a lot of energy is the 1990s now we'll go into asking in what ways some common stories can be told. Some of you from other nations see how these are going on in the US and I think being a great gift to that majority of people on a campus or in a city that are US citizens, you have your own versions, wherever you are and Saul close now with little reference to the US. I think a lot of energy is going into asking with this diversity, which will only keep growing pluralism will not go away. We will be in Islam. Oh judeo Christian Society. We are in Asia so Islam, oh judeo-christians decide if we're going to keep that's going to keep going. In the middle of it how we find some common (00:49:56) discourse some Unum. (00:49:59) I don't like to see the nation as the only such reality and ecumenism is and world religions are marvelous reminders as President Harry Smith of Austin College reminded me the day I (00:50:10) forgot (00:50:12) but within a nation certain stories do develop and I think in the u.s. We have common space and time people like it here. (00:50:23) Parched (00:50:24) area west of El Paso the guy spits on the ground says God's country Sweatshop Jews in the 1920s 12 hours a day six days a week and they said it's God's country. They want to go back to Russia. Is she a Leo? He says you sacralized the place when you settle their you really endowed with certain meanings got something to work with. We have a common story that keeps growing. It isn't only the pilgrims but don't ever forget the pilgrims. It's also Martin Luther King story now and he's just as Vivid and Dorothy Day story and a lot of other people story keeps growing. We have mytho symbolic ways of telling the story. We don't say 87 years ago. We say four score and seven years ago. We have places and days where we try to set that we have common propositions. You can tell how much my celebration of the Challenger pluralism in the limits of pluralism relies on the US Constitution. It is a big deal to have a common document that at least gives you the ground rules for this polity John Courtney. Marie said we have at least a few propositions we hold these truths to be self-evident and the authors of them didn't live in to them or even know what they're writing and we don't live in to them and know what all is in them, but they're a nice working hypothesis for what we want this Republic to keep growing to be We can soften the hardest edges of our militancy is of our separate identities. We've had common suffering common projects in 18th century terms common affection, which doesn't mean sentimentality. It means a common experiential life. This college I know is struggling with justice (00:52:12) issue (00:52:13) on one level it inherits from the West the biblical the judeo Christian some zone of privilege discourse, but back to Harry Smith and the first story I would argue it is one that allows for the confrontation with the other it always wants you to learn from the neighbor and the stranger you impart you draw you are in a conversation and the mark remarkable thing about conversations is you never know where they will lead. Today many great thinkers less a color Kowski George Steiner. I could make a long list are saying we are too far away from the Enlightenment and to dissatisfied with mere hegemony of secular reason to live back in that 18th century off which we've posted and we are too far from the Theocratic Jairo Craddock one religion societies of the Middle Ages or whenever to go back to it. But with the changes in Eastern Europe and Africa and Asia and our own Society The attentiveness we have to pay as mr. Gorbachev said to mr. John Paul II to the spirituality of the Russian and all the other people my hunch is that the conversation that goes on here about the one and the many is fateful difficult and promising. Thank you.