Brian Grim will participate in a Cross Cultural Religious Literacy (CCRL) Summit in Krakow, Poland, in early June. The Summit will seek to develop best practices and chart new possibilities for CCRL and is convened by the Templeton Religion Trust, Love Your Neighbor Community, and The Review of Faith & International Affairs.
As summarized in “Toward a Global Covenant of Peaceable Neighborhood,”
Covenantal pluralism is simultaneously about “top-down” legal and policy parameters and “bottom-up” cultural norms and practices. A world of covenantal pluralism is characterized both by a constitutional order of equal rights and responsibilities and by a culture of reciprocal commitment to engaging, respecting, and protecting the other— albeit without necessarily conceding equal veracity or moral equivalence to the beliefs and behaviors of others. The envisioned end-state is neither a thin-soup ecumenism nor vague syncretism, but rather a positive, practical, non-relativistic pluralism. It is a paradigm of civic fairness and human solidarity, a covenant of global neighborliness….
Covenantal Pluralism has three key constitutive dimensions: (1) freedom of religion and belief (including equal treatment of all people, of any faith or none), (2) cross-cultural religious literacy, and (3) character virtues essential for living constructively with deep difference.
The practice of CCRL presupposes, embodies, and expresses all of these dimensions. CCRL is a framework of engagement bringing religious freedom and religious responsibility together; that is, it brings equal citizens together to take take on our world’s greatest challenges, building dynamic and resilient societies, and states, as a result. In other words, the core commodity of CCRL is trust— it usually begins in the transactional, but if sustained, becomes transformational. Put one last way: CCRL builds teachers who embody an empathetic and elicitive engagement methodology, as demonstrated in the “classroom” (of life), that ripples across the campus, community, culture, and country.