Updated 2019
“On Peace and Religious Literacy” by Douglas R. McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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On Peace and „Religious“ Literacy:
A Response to Ulrich Rosenhagen
Not surprisingly, the popular response to religious violence is a call to peaceful understanding of the “other.” Given the pressing need in our climate of violence to foster the understanding of religion, Ulrich Rosenhagen at the University of Wisconsin in his commentary piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education of December 2, 2015, entitled “The Value of Teaching Religious Literacy” calls for an “immersion” approach that would establish student “learning communities” of various religious confessions sharing the same living and study space. The goal is “to learn from one another” not “about” one another. The principle driving this “immersion” model of religious studies is that direct experience of religious differences fosters the cultivation of our common humanity.
