Interfaith Dialogue…With Weaponry

Philip Jenkins, who has a history of writing intelligently about religion in the Third World, has an engaging article in The American Conservative about Muslim/Christian conflicts in Indonesia, Nigeria, and elsewhere in Asia and Africa. Jenkins rejects Samuel Huntington's simplistic Clash of Civilizations narrative and its "notion of a world divided among vast religious-cultural blocs," because it "assumes that these units remain fairly constant, so that tension occurs only along their periphery. Yet cultural blocs change dramatically within their borders as well, and we are presently living through a dizzying era of shifting boundaries." For some details on those shifts and their consequences, read the article.