You Tube Theology

On December 8, 2016, the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture hosted an afternoon panel discussion with John Inazu, Stanley Hauerwas, and Larycia Hawkins to probe the connections between Confident Pluralism and the university and to question the challenges and possibilities that arise from these connections. John Inazu's Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference, raises constitutional and civic challenges for improving our fractured society. The Washington Post's Michael Gerson has said that Confident Pluralism "perfectly suits a cultural moment not by reflecting the prevailing ethos, but by challenging it at the deepest level." And religion scholar Charles Mathewes has written that this "remarkable book... grabs by the throat the most profound problem we face: the question of whether we can live truly with each other, not merely alongside each other, in situations where we genuinely feel most alienated from, and even threatened by, one another's beliefs or behaviors." The challenges raised by Confident Pluralism are particularly acute in the modern university, which the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once envisioned "as a place of constrained disagreement, of imposed participation in conflict, in which a central responsibility of higher education would be to initiate students into conflict." MacIntyre's vision faces increased pressure from the realities of ideological, religious, and racial diversity; the changing nature of the humanities; debates over the limits of campus speech; and the contested purposes of higher education in contemporary society.