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The sacred Hindu thread ceremony, the "upanayana," at Sri Venkateswara Temple, Bridgewater, New Jersey.

A few years ago, my Harvard colleague Samuel Huntington, a distinguished political scientist, wrote of the deep religious currents that so profoundly shape the great civilizations of the world.(see footnote) In the new post-Cold War era, he predicted that "civilizational identity" will have a major role in the coming political realignment. He contended that the Confucian, Islamic, and Hindu worlds will be forces to reckon with in the geopolitical arena and he foresees a "clash of civilizations." But where exactly are these worlds and civilizations, we might ask, with Hindus in Leicester, Durban, Toronto, and Houston? With huge mosques in Paris, London, Chicago, and Toledo? One of the decisive facts of the 1980s and 1990s has been the tremendous migration of peoples from one nation to another, both as immigrants and as refugees. Every part of the globe is experiencing the demographic changes of these migrations. Today, the Islamic world is no longer somewhere else, in some other part of the world; instead Chicago, with its 50 mosques and nearly half a million Muslims, is part of the Islamic world. America today is part of the Islamic, the Hindu, the Confucian world. It is precisely the interpenetration of ancient civilizations and cultures that is the hallmark of the late twentieth century. This is our new georeligious reality. The map of the world in which we now live cannot be color-coded as to its Christian, Muslim, or Hindu identity, but each part of the world is marbled with the colors and textures of the whole.

The plurality of religious traditions and cultures challenges people in every part of the world today, including the United States, which is now the most religiously diverse country on earth. Diversity we have-here in America and here at Harvard. It is not an ideology invented by the multicultural enthusiasts of the left. It is the new reality of our society. Diversity we have.

New construction supervised by Phramaha Prasert Kavissaro, abbot at Wat Buddhanusorn, a Thai Buddhist temple in Freemont, California.

But what is pluralism? First, pluralism is not diversity alone, but the energetic engagement with that diversity. Diversity can and has meant the creation of religious ghettoes with little traffic between or among them. In this new world of religious diversity, pluralism is not a given, but an achievement. In the world into which we now move, diversity without engagement, without a fabric of relationship, will be increasingly difficult and increasingly dangerous.

Second, pluralism will require not just tolerance, but the active seeking of understanding. Tolerance is a necessary public virtue, but it does not require Christians and Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and ardent secularists to know anything about one another. Tolerance is simply too thin a foundation for a world of religious differences. It does nothing to remove our ignorance of one another, and leaves in place the stereotype, the half-truth, the fear that underlie old patterns of division and violence. In the world into which we now move, our ignorance of one another will be increasingly costly.

Masjid Al-Khair in Youngstown, Ohio.

And finally, pluralism is not simply relativism. The new paradigm of pluralism does not require us to leave our identities and our commitments behind, for pluralism is the encounter of commitments. It means holding our deepest differences, even our religious differences, not in isolation, but in relationship to one another. The language of pluralism is that of dialogue and encounter, give and take, criticism and self-criticism. In the world into which we now move, it is a language we will have to learn.

Whether in India or America, whether on New Hampshire Avenue or at Harvard University, the challenge for all of us today is how to shape societies, nations, neighborhoods, and universities that now replicate and potentially may reconfigure the differences that have long divided humankind.

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Diana L. Eck, Ph.D. '76, professor of comparative religion and Indian studies, chairs the Committee on the Study of Religion in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and is also director of the Pluralism Project. The project's multimedia CD-ROM, On Common Ground: World Religions in America, will be published in early 1997 by Columbia University Press. Eck's most recent book is Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras (Beacon Press, 1993). This article is slightly adapted from Eck's 1996 Phi Beta Kappa Oration, delivered during Commencement week.

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Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?", Foreign Affairs, Volume 72, number 3 (summer, 1993).

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