In a larger Books & Culture essay about Jewish-Christian dialogue, Lauren F. Winner reflects on reading Gustav Niebuhr’s 2008 book, Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America:
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The NCCJ was not far from my mind as I read Gustav Niebuhr’s Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America, an engaging journalistic portrait of contemporary interfaith endeavors. Niebuhr showcases groups of Christians who helped guard Muslim buildings against vandalism in the weeks after 9/11; a Congregationalist church that, after realizing their own numbers were dwindling, gave their church building and land to the local Jewish community; Methodists in California who raised money for the rebuilding of three Sacramento synagogues that had been destroyed by arsonists; Jews and Episcopalians who helped fund the repair of a mosque damaged by American bombing in Afghanistan; Muslim and Hindu communities that intentionally “welcome the curious” to educational tours of their mosques and temples.
Niebuhr describes people of different faiths getting together and getting to know one another better, and he describes episodes in which people of different faiths work together in the pursuit of some shared civic goal. Niebuhr argues that these partnerships—neighbors of different faiths helping guard mosques against vandalism, for instance—go beyond “mere courtesy” and “being ‘nice.'” Rather, they represent “vitality within a functioning civil society, the creation of networks that reach beyond obvious boundaries.” In a country in which mosques are being vandalized, such social engagements are not to be gainsaid.
Continue reading at Books & Culture. For more on Niebuhr, see Tavis Smiley, Chautauqua, and a review in the Washington Post.