The History of Pluralism
the history of pluralism
The fall of 1990, some 25 students joined Diana Eck for a course at Harvard University on “World Religions in New England.” Each week, the class would divide into teams to visit religious communities in the Boston area and then meet to discuss what we had learned. From Sri Lakshmi Temple, located close to the starting point of the Boston Marathon, to New England’s first mosque, established in the shadows of the cranes of Quincy’s shipyards, we began to discover and document a religious landscape being transformed before our eyes. The guidebook World Religions in Boston: A Guide to Communities and Resources grew out of this initial research.
Based on our findings in Boston, we set out to investigate more broadly the changing religious landscape of other American cities, and to consider the implications of this more complex religious landscape for American public life. From the beginning, it was clear that diversity alone does not constitute pluralism. Pluralism requires a degree of engagement with our diversity and the knowledge — both of others and of ourselves — that such engagement brings. And so, in 1991, the Pluralism Project was born.
The Pluralism Project engaged the best energies of Harvard students from both the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Divinity School in “hometown” research in such cities as Denver, Houston, and Minneapolis. Some had a more specific focus: Hindu summer camps in Pennsylvania, Vietnamese Buddhist struggles with zoning laws in California, the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America in Kansas City, or the history of the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington, D.C. Each year, during the subsequent fall semester, the researchers presented their work at a Pluralism Project research conference. And for one semester each year, all the researchers participated in a working seminar to revise their research into substantial papers.
Beginning in 1994, a team of students from
The fall of 1990, some 25 students joined Diana Eck for a course at Harvard University on “World Religions in New England.” Each week, the class would divide into teams to visit religious communities in the Boston area and then meet to discuss what we had learned. From Sri Lakshmi Temple, located close to the starting point of the Boston Marathon, to New England’s first mosque, established in the shadows of the cranes of Quincy’s shipyards, we began to discover and document a religious landscape being transformed before our eyes. The guidebook World Religions in Boston: A Guide to Communities and Resources grew out of this initial research.
Based on our findings in Boston, we set out to investigate more broadly the changing religious landscape of other American cities, and to consider the implications of this more complex religious landscape for American public life. From the beginning, it was clear that diversity alone does not constitute pluralism. Pluralism requires a degree of engagement with our diversity and the knowledge — both of others and of ourselves — that such engagement brings. And so, in 1991, the Pluralism Project was born.
The Pluralism Project engaged the best energies of Harvard students from both the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Divinity School in “hometown” research in such cities as Denver, Houston, and Minneapolis. Some had a more specific focus: Hindu summer camps in Pennsylvania, Vietnamese Buddhist struggles with zoning laws in California, the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America in Kansas City, or the history of the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington, D.C. Each year, during the subsequent fall semester, the researchers presented their work at a Pluralism Project research conference. And for one semester each year, all the researchers participated in a working seminar to revise their research into substantial papers.
Beginning in 1994, a team of students from