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ERIC Number: EJ1140021
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2017
Pages: N/A
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0024-1822
EISSN: N/A
On Building a Diverse Democracy: Justice and Identity in the Twenty-First Century
Patel, Eboo
Liberal Education, v103 n1 Win 2017
Passionate about making interfaith cooperation the social norm in a highly diverse religious world landscape, Eboo Patel is founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core. The organization brings together young people of different religious and moral traditions for cooperative service and dialogue around shared values. In this article, which is adapted from the convocation address delivered at Oberlin College on October 2016, Patel draws from his own life experiences, ideas, and people he met as a younger person and reflects upon how they have shaped the expansion of his world view. Advocating the idea that world religions should be a bridge of cooperation rather than a barrier of division, Patel writes that he believes a liberally educated person should recognize that, in a world of different identities, there are likely to be different definitions of justice, especially when it becomes clear that different people who have similar identities interpret various definitions differently. He advocates that diversity is not just about the differences one likes but also the differences one does not like. He reminds the students that any time they are in a room where everyone agrees with their definition of justice, it is probably not a diverse room. Patel believes that a college education is about proactively looking for the hard examples, the cases that do not fit inside one's own worldview, precisely for the purpose of expanding it.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A