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Disciplined openness and the reality of community

02.29.08 | 1 Comment

From James Fowler:

Conjunctive faith includes a genuine openness to the truths of traditions and communities other than one’s own. This openness is not to be equated with a relativistic agnosticism (literally, a “not knowing”), however. Rather, it is a disciplined openness to the truths of those who are “other,” based precisely on the experience of a deep and particular commitment to one’s own tradition and the recognition that truth requires a dialectical interplay of such perspectives.

And…

Conjunctive faith combines deep, particular commitments with principled openness to the truths of other traditions. It combines loyalty to one’s own primary communities of value and belief with loyalty to the reality of a community of communities. Persons of conjunctive faith are not likely to be “true believers” in the sense of displaying an undialectical, single-minded, uncritical devotion to a cause or ideology. They will not be protagonists in holy wars. They know that the line between the righteous and the sinner goes through the heart of each of us and our communities, rather than between “us” and “them.”

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