The Christian Century

The sharp awareness of religious pluralism that developed in the 20th century is likely only to intensify in the 21st century. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, people of other faiths and people of no explicit faith will increasingly work, study and play together—and share their faith with one another in formal and informal ways.

Reli­gious freedom has become a potent rallying cry. That is an excellent development—provided we avoid turning the issue into a partisan weapon in the confrontation between Chris­­tianity and Islam.

Three years ago, on the very first broadcast of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, the PBS program I host, we did a feature on a stretch of road outside Washington, D.C., that has been nicknamed the “Highway of Heaven.” Side by side, block after block, is an amazing variety of new places of worship for Vietnamese Catholics, Korean Presbyterians, Cambodian Buddhists, Ukrainian Ortho

In the wake of the terrorist fury unleashed by Osama bin Laden and his Islamic al-Qaeda organization on September 11, Western analysts have been scrambling to analyze the competing ideologies that have brought about a violent collision between two cultures.