For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about Renovatio.
Last spring the inaugural edition of Renovatio, a Muslim journal of ideas published by Zaytuna College in Berkeley, addressed various themes in the field of metaphysics. The investigation of first principles and basic assumptions was an especially appropriate topic for the launch of this new intellectual endeavor. While the first issue sought to find areas of philosophical common ground, especially among religious believers, the journal’s second issue, published this past fall, examined how we can promote harmony and tolerance when that common agreement can’t be reached.
In his opening essay for the issue, Renovatio editor-in-chief and Zaytuna College President Hamza Yusuf questioned where the challenges of true pluralism really lie. Is pluralism difficult because our points of view are so different, or is part of the problem that, counterintuitively, many supposedly pluralistic viewpoints suffer from an unacknowledged and stifling similarity? Beneath our allegedly multicultural societies, Yusuf suggests, we often find something that looks much more like a monoculture: “The clothes people wear, the phones they stare at, the fast foods they eat, the blockbuster movies they watch at multiplexes, the music that blares into their heads through their earbuds — much of it has a sameness that contributes to the monoculture that has swallowed up the diversity.”