Overview

In Religion and Radical Pluralism: Engaging Rawls and Gandhi, Jeff Shawn Jose confronts the question of the role of religion in the public sphere through the writings of John Rawls and Mahatma Gandhi. Jose explores Rawls’s and Gandhi’s contrasting and complementary views through the framework of three objections—integrity, fairness, and divisiveness—against a view of public reason that restricts the expression of religious arguments in the public sphere. The book introduces Gandhi’s ideas into Rawls’s political liberal framework and brings Rawls’s ideas into the Gandhian religious framework, a critical and creative encounter where the relationship between Gandhian and Rawlsian approaches becomes a fertile ground for reciprocal, dialectical reflections. Religion and Radical Pluralism teases out and evaluates the tensions and prospects in Rawls’s and Gandhi’s views on the role of religion in the public sphere, thus offering a pertinent contribution to the study of radical pluralism in contemporary societies.

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9781666920451

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The innovative character of this book lies in a confrontation between John Rawls's and Mahatma Gandhi's views of the place of religion in the public sphere, marked by radical pluralism. The author not only gives a critical analysis of Rawls's ideas on this matter from a Gandhian perspective but also criticizes Gandhi's religious ideas from Rawls's liberal point of view. To make this confrontation academically sound and fair, the author needs an intermediate between the ideas of these two thinkers: he introduces three fundamental objections, which have been raised against Rawls's ideas from a religious perspective, viz. the integrity objection, the fairness objection, and the divisiveness objection. These objections serve as the theoretical groundwork for a well-argued critique of Rawls from a Gandhian perspective. Moreover, since Rawls and other proponents of political liberalism have extensively responded to these objections, they can, in turn, be employed to discuss the weaknesses of Gandhi's views from a Rawlsian point of view. The confrontation between a Western and non-Western perspective on the role of religion in the public sphere makes this book highly relevant to the ongoing debate about this fundamental question.--Peter Jonkers, emeritus professor, Tilburg University

Author Information

Jeff Shawn Jose is assistant professor in the Faculty of Philosophy and director of the Centre for the Study of World Religions at Dharmaram Vidya Kshetram.

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