ABOUT THE CENTER

Mission
The Boniuk Center for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance aims to understand and to promote conditions conducive to sustainable, peaceful co-existence among people of different religions around the world.

Background 

Established in July of 2004, the Center supports research on a wide range of topics related to religious tolerance and promulgates this knowledge with the aims of understanding and promoting conditions conducive to sustainable, peaceful co-existence among people of different religions.

Some arguments for tolerance are well developed. However, these usually rely on historically contingent ways of thinking that emerged comparatively recently, in societies where an idea of inalienable human rights together with a conceptual distinction between “public” and “private” produced a putatively secular public sphere. Such arguments have, not surprisingly, proven most persuasive in communities that accept both a clear public/private distinction and the relegation of religion to the private sphere. The Boniuk Center exists to deepen and enrich these ideas of tolerance while simultaneously seeking others that have emerged or that might emerge in different contexts and from different assumptions. 

Our underlying principle is simple: just as religious conflict cannot be analyzed independently of political, cultural, economic, and social contexts, so a meaningful international commitment to religious tolerance requires that we understand religious identities, traditions, and histories in light of other spheres of human life. The Center fulfills its mission by supporting scholarly projects that study religious difference from this broad perspective and thus lay the groundwork for pluralism and tolerance in many modern societies. Because it seeks not only to understand but also to promote conditions conducive to religious tolerance, the Boniuk Center makes its research findings available with the eventual aim of supporting, in collaboration with political and religious leaders, a set of principles conducive to tolerance that could command respect and allegiance among diverse religious communities. 

Rice University's faculty provides a strong foundation on which to build this Center. The School of Humanities and the allied departments of Sociology, Anthropology, and Political Science now house leading scholars of religion and history whose work is directly concerned with issues of persecution, religious extremism, and the impact of religion on contemporary political processes around the globe. At this moment individual Rice Faculty are examining the meanings of jihad and martyrdom within Muslim communities over time; the persecutions of Jewish populations in medieval Europe; the role of African American churches in the nineteenth-century battle against slavery; the political and ethical implications of the critical study of gender and sexuality in the world religions; and the relationship between religion and freedom of expression in Arab and Israeli media. 

Rice is also home to the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy now under the leadership of Edward Djerejian, who has served as Ambassador to Syria and Israel and as Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. Through the Baker Institute, Rice attracts leading policy makers and governmental officials from around the world, many of whom deal with various aspects of religious conflict. The Baker Institute can, among other functions, provide a forum for the findings of the Center and a venue for conferences and other gatherings on religious tolerance. By building on these formidable strengths at Rice, the Boniuk Center will develop new perspectives from which to study and promote tolerance across religious communities and within many different political and social contexts.
 

Faculty Executive Committee

Carol Quillen (History), Center Director

Mahmoud El-Gamal (Economics)

James Faubion (Anthropology)

Anne Klein (Religious Studies)

Jeffrey Kripal (Religious Studies)

Paula Sanders (History)

Anthony Pinn (Religious Studies)

Gregory Kaplan (Religious Studies; liaison to the Houston Holocaust Museum)

Allen Matusow (History; liaison to the Baker Institute)