During the past decade or so an almost obsessive attention has been paid to the ways in which states and social institutions understand, monitor, and regulate religious diversity.  The challenges of the disparities between formal constitutional guarantees and legal regulations have been mapped; the normative contents of particular regulatory regimes identified; and the move from the secular into the post-secular proclaimed. Yet, in the midst of this flurry of academic activity, people go about their everyday lives encountering diversity and difference and negotiating their way through it, oftentimes in a manner that achieves a de facto justice, sense of fairness, and recognition of equality. This realm of everyday activity has remained largely outside the scope of attention of the conversation about diversity. The goal of “Living with Religious Diversity” is to highlight these everyday negotiations through a focus on civil society,  in transnational perspective.  Religious violence crosses borders, we all recognize, but so do ideas about how to live together peacefully, theological reflections on pluralism, and lived practices of friendship across the borders of religious identity-groupings. 

The seminar is organized around four major themes:
  1)  how religious and state actors collaborate to create particular models of religious behaviour in various states and contexts;
    2)  what kinds of conditions, beliefs and practices within religious communities foster or hinder both inter- and intra-group equality under legal regimes where these communities are granted different forms and degrees of autonomy;
    3)   the potential role of publicly-funded schools and universities in educating citizens about religion;
    4)  non-state measures, including ones that draw on the internal resources of religious traditions, that may help to counter tendencies towards exclusive, rigid and hostile definitions of identity.