Tagged: diversity

Is paying for things you find objectionable a violation of conscience?

The question in the title of this blog has been on my mind for the last week or so in the wake of the health care/birth control debate.  I’m not interested in weighing in on that debate per se, but in linking it to broader questions about individual conscience and the public good. To review […]

Want a more tolerant, united world? Make some friends.

As those who have been reading this blog for a while may remember, I wrote a long series of blog posts last summer discussing the problem of unity in The United Methodist Church.  I think unity is a problem in the church, but I also think it’s a general problem in society.  How do we […]

Unity without sameness?

In my past several blog posts, I’ve been examining various possible sources of unity for The United Methodist Church.  One assumption behind these posts so far has been that it may be possible to find something(s) that ties together all United Methodists and that unity in the denomination depends upon finding such thing(s).  I’ve certainly […]

Bind Us Together, Lord

In the old hymn, Christians petition God to “bind us together with cords that cannot be broken”.  The song then goes on to ask God to “bind us together with love”.  It is a worthwhile question for Christians to ask ourselves what the nature is of the cords that bind us together.  This question is […]

The Problem of Pluralism

Last post, I examined two different definitions of pluralism: one which describes a state of society characterized by cultural, religious, ethnic, and other forms of diversity and one which embraces such a state of society.  I then tried to distinguish the second definition from relativism.  This post, I’d like to return to that first definition […]

Pluralism vs. Relativism

I read an article earlier this week (“Theorizing Religion in the Global Age: A Typological Analysis” by Martin Geoffrey, who, like me, has two first names) in which the author laid out a typology between four different types of religion in our modern, global world.  Among these four were pluralist and relativist.  I found Geoffrey’s […]