Aaron Hackett Reading Blog 1

I recently read an article about feminism. It wasn’t what would normally except from a feminist write. It didn’t claim any sort of female superiority or advocation of woman’s rights. Instead it addressed the importance of the feminist viewpoint on the nature of a person in the context of religious pluralism. The viewpoint is called hybridity and takes into account both the uniqueness and sameness of whatever the object of analysis may be. This is a very important idea to present to interfaith dialogue because problems arise when faiths try to communicate and focus too much on either sameness or uniqueness. The result of focusing only on sameness is that the faiths communicating lose their identity and will rarely gain any new knowledge of themselves. The result of focusing too much on uniqueness is that the faiths communicating never find a productive topic of discussion and eventually each is just trying to depict to the other why they should convert. In the case of focusing too much on uniqueness, neither of the faiths learn any knowledge of the other. I think it is extremely interesting that a viewpoint from a perspective usually not considered spiritual can have such a positive affect on interfaith dialogue.