John Inazu and Eboo Patel, a law professor and a visiting scholar, have teamed up to co-teach “Religion, Politics, and the University,” a course offered through the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics of Washington University in St. Louis.
The course, which debuted this semester, questions how a diverse democracy can develop and be successful in a pluralistic society. Specifically, it considers how to engage in situations where the legitimate expression of one group’s identity is a legitimate violation of another’s.
“The most interesting cases in a diverse democracy are right vs. right cases, not right vs. wrong cases,” said Patel in an article in the Source, a publication of the university.
A visiting Danforth Scholar and founder-director of the national Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), Patel says “We want our students to be able to frame that—in the kind of conversations we’re having in this course—as one of the challenges that is just part of a diverse democracy and view it as part of the landscape to positively manage and engage—and not something that’s going to be an easy resolution.”
Inazu, the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law & Religion at Washington University’s School of Law, recently released his second book, Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference.
He hopes Patel’s experience at the helm of IFYC, a Chicago-based nonprofit aimed at promoting interfaith cooperation, will help Washington University learn and improve how it engages in religious diversity.
One key aspect of the course is the examination of political and religious issues of diversity in the context of a university.
“I increasingly think that the university is sort of a microcosm of the rest of democratic society and the immense challenges that we’re facing now are playing out in their own ways in the university context,” Inazu said. “If we can’t figure it out here—where we often have the luxury of time and we have the benefit of an institutional focus on reflection—where are we going to do it?”
From its beginnings, the Church of Scientology has recognized that freedom of religion is a fundamental human right. In a world where conflicts are often traceable to intolerance of others’ religious beliefs and practices, the Church has, for more than 50 years, made the preservation of religious liberty an overriding concern.
The Church publishes this blog to help create a better understanding of the freedom of religion and belief and provide news on religious freedom and issues affecting this freedom around the world.
