NOSTRA AETATE AND THE CALL TO DIALOGUE
Keywords:
NOSTRA AETATE, DIALOGUE, POPE PAUL VI, SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL, TOLERATIONAbstract
Nostra Aetate urges Catholics towards dialogue and understanding of other faith traditions. This paper considers the challenge presented by the practice of inter-faith dialogue to the standard liberal account of toleration as put forward by prominent contemporary liberal theorists. Such theorists argue that toleration can undergird modern pluralism despite mutual incomprehension between citizens of different moral or faith traditions. Against this view, I argue that modern ‘hyper-pluralism’ demands more than tolerance amidst incomprehension; the maintenance of stable pluralism requires practices of dialogue, including language learning and translation, through which adherents of religious traditions, and non-adherents, can develop mutual understanding. I explore the ways in which inter-faith dialogue establishes political and communal space in which ‘engaged understanding’ can be fostered.
References
Nadia Urbinati, “Laicite in Reverse: Mono-Religious Democracies and the Issue of Religion in the Public Sphere,” Constellations 17 (2010).
Stephen Macedo, “In Defense of Liberal Public Reason: Are Slavery and Abortion Hard Cases?” in Natural Law and Public Reason, eds. Robert P. George and Christopher Wolfe, Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2000.
Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
Akeel Bilgrami, “Secularism,” in Boundaries of Toleration, ed. Alfred Stepan, New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
Steven Kautz, “Liberalism and the Idea of Toleration,” American Journal of Political Science 37 (1993).
Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
William E. Connolly, Pluralism, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, Trans. Joel Weinsheimer & Donald G. Marshall, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013.
Luke Bretherton, “A Post-Secular Politics? Inter-faith Relations as a Civic Practice,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79 (2011).
Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political, London: Verso, 1993.
Fred Dalmayr, Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars, Lexington, Kentucky: The University of Kentucky Press, 2010.
Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 1988.
James Boyd, Justice as Translation: An Essay in Cultural and Legal Criticism, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990.
