Dissent on Core Beliefs: Religious and Secular Perspectives

Difference, diversity and disagreement are inevitable features of our ethical, social and political landscape. This collection of new essays investigates the ways that various ethical and religious traditions have dealt with intramural dissent; the volume covers nine separate traditions: Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, liberalism, Marxism, South Asian religions and natural law. Each chapter lays out the distinctive features, history and challenges of intramural dissent within each tradition, enabling readers to identify similarities and differences between traditions. The book concludes with an Afterword by Michael Walzer, offering a synoptic overview of the challenge of intramural dissent and the responses to that challenge. Committed to dialogue across cultures and traditions, the collection begins that dialogue with the common challenges facing all traditions: how to maintain cohesion and core values in the face of pluralism, and how to do this in a way that is consistent with the internal ethical principles of the traditions.

Simone Chambers is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto. She has been teaching at the University of Toronto since 2002, and her primary areas of scholarship include democratic theory, ethics, secularism, rhetoric, civility and the public sphere. She has published articles in journals including Political Theory, Journal of Political Philosophy, Ethics and Global Politics, and Critical Review.

Peter Nosco is Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Remembering Paradise: Nativism and Nostalgia in 18th-Century Japan (1990), Individuality in Early Modern Japan: Thinking for Oneself (2017), and the editor of Confucianism and Tokugawa Culture (1997) and Values, Identity, and Equality in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Japan (with James Ketelaar and Kojima Yasunori, 2015). He has served as guest editor for special issues of Philosophy East and West and Japanese Journal of Religious Studies.