Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society From Enemy to Adversary

US citizens perceive their society to be one of the most diverse and religiously tolerant in the world today. Yet seemingly intractable religious intolerance and moral conflict abound throughout contemporary US public life - from abortion law battles, same-sex marriage, post-9/11 Islamophobia, public school curriculum controversies, to moral and religious dimensions of the Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street movements, and Tea Party populism. Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society develops an approach to democratic discourse and coalition-building across deep moral and religious divisions. Drawing on conflict transformation in peace studies, recent American pragmatist thought, and models of agonistic democracy, Jason Springs argues that, in circumstances riven with conflict between strong religious identities and deep moral and political commitments, productive engagement may depend on thinking creatively about how to constructively utilize conflict and intolerance. The result is an approach oriented by the recognition of conflict as a constituent and life-giving feature of social and political relationships.

Introduction; Part I. Pragmatist Repertoires: 1. The difficulty of imagining other persons, re-imagined: moral imagination as a tool for transforming conflict; 2. Turning the searchlight inward: cultivating the virtues of moral imagination; 3. To let suffering speak: love, justice, and hope against hope; 4. The prophet and the president: prophetic rage in the age of Obama; 5. Testing the spirits: discerning true prophecy from false; 6. 'Dismantling the master's house': using the system to transform the system; Part II. Beyond American Intolerance: 7. Giving religious intolerance its due: agonistic respect in a post-secular society; 8. Looking it up in your gut?: Visceral politics and healthy conflict in the tea party era; 9. Islamophobia, American style: tolerance as American exceptionalism, and the prospects for strenuous pluralism; Conclusion.

Jason A. Springs is Associate Professor of Religion, Ethics, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame. Springs's articles appear in the Journal of Religious Ethics, the Journal for the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Religion, and Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. He is the author of Toward a Generous Orthodoxy: Prospects for Hans Frei's Postliberal Theology (2010), and co-author (with Atalia Omer) of Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook (2013).