Our friend Robby Jones recently posted another installment of Progressive Religious Voices, his series of podcasts with faith leaders and religious scholars. The latest is a discussion of religious pluralism with Eboo Patel, who also asked Senator Clinton a question at The Compassion Forum. Eboo shares with a Robby a number of insights, including the following:

I think that we have a new line in the twenty-first century, and that new line is the faith line. And just like a lot of people thought the color line separated black and white and yellow and red, and it took a visionary like Martin Luther King, Jr. to say, “No, no, no. What the color line separates are people who want to live together as brothers and people who would perish together as fools.” I think of the faith line in the same way.

The faith line does not separate Muslims and Christians or Jews and Hindus. The faith line separates who I call religious pluralists and religious totalitarians. And the definitions of those two in my mind
are pretty clear and straightforward. A religious totalitarian is somebody who wants their way of
being, believing and belonging to dominate everything and for everyone else to suffocate. A religious
pluralist is somebody who may well believe very, very deeply in their own traditions, may even be an
exclusivist and believe that their own tradition is the only right tradition, but fundamentally believes
in a society where people from different backgrounds have the freedom and the right to live by their
own traditions and where those different groups of people can live together in equal dignity and
mutual loyalty. So pluralism has three layers, in my mind. The first layer is identity, the second layer
is relationship, and the third layer is common good. Identity, community, common good.