Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society

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).

'Jason A. Springs provides a timely reframing of our contemporary debates that have littered our political, religious, and social landscape with either an eager exclusion of the 'other' as extremist lost cases or through appeals toward some form of tolerant co-existence that mostly avoids any meaningful relationship across the divides. He wades into these broiling waters with the message that deep conflict will remain, in fact contemporary polarization will likely mark our discourse for decades to come, but this reality offers opportunity to practice a core set of basic democratic habits that may guide us away from this descending toward dysfunctional harm. Social health, he argues, depends not on denigrating the other or pursuing echo chambers, but on sustaining relationships that persist in carving qualities of imagination, a dose of empathic patience, and the courage to stay engaged with those who we find remarkably different and even offensive.' John Paul Lederach, author of The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace and Professor Emeritus, University of Notre Dame, Indiana

• 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.