Dealing with Diversity : Religion, Globalization, Violence, Gender and Disaster in Indonesia

Abstract

This book is about how we should deal with diversity. Hannah Arendt argued that true power is the ability of ordinary people to work together to actually change the world (Arendt, 1970, Adeney-Risakotta, 2005). Contrary to Max Weber, who saw power as domination, or Mao Zedong who famously said “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”, Arendt’s insight was that real change comes from below, from people working together. Dominating power, which is one response to diversity, often creates more negative destruction than it does positive change. Diversity is a great barrier (in addition to all the normal vices), to working together. There are many kinds of diversity: religious, cultural, ideological, social, political, economic, etc. People are different from each other. A businessman commented, “Just staying together is success.” The ongoing splits and divisions in our religious and other civil society organizations is a testimony to the difficulty of dealing with diversity. This book focuses on religious diversity as one of the most vexing phenomena of our times.