Calvin Participates in 9/11 Conference

Calvin College and University Yale philosophy professor emeritus Nicholas Wolterstorff will provide the opening keynote address at a conference on "Liberty and Tolerance in an Age of Religious Conflict" runningSept. 8-11 at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Kelly James Clark, Calvin professor of philosophy, author and editor of the book titled "Abraham’s Children: Liberty and Tolerance in an Age of Religious Conflict," will also participate.

The conference, which marks the deadly terrorist attacks ofSept. 11, 2001, is being funded by a grant that the Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., received from the John Templeton Foundation.

OnSept. 11, 2001, commercial airplanes being operated by radical Muslim terrorists crashed into the World Trade Towers in New York City, into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and crash-landed in a farm field in Pennsylvania. Some 3,000 people died in the attacks.

Bringing together Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars and practitioners, this week's conference will include discussions on Muslim, Jewish and Christian perspectives on religious tolerance.

The $189,000 Templeton Foundation grant is also being used, in part, to underwrite the book, "Abraham’s Children: Liberty and Tolerance in an Age of Religious Conflict," of which Clark is the editor. The book includes essays from five Muslim, five Christian and five Jewish scholars.

The conference will help launch the book. Contributors include the former U.S. president, Jimmy Carter, and the former president of Indonesia, Abdurrahman Wahid. This book will be published in the English, Arabic, Turkish and Indonesian languages.

"Many religious believers are skeptical of liberal defenses of religious tolerance that ignore or dismiss their religious convictions," said Clark. "Religious believers must, then, find within their own traditions the essential ingredients of tolerance and liberty."

This week's conference will bring many of the contributors to "Abraham’s Children" together to take a hard look at different approaches to freedom and co-existence within the religious traditions.

"We are looking forward to this important conference," said Thomas Banchoff, director Georgetown's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, which is hosting the conference. "Any effort to deepen appreciation for religious liberty and tolerance while excluding religious voices is bound to fail."

For more information and a complete conference schedule, visit Conference on Tolerance. For additional information, contact Kelly James Clark at [email protected] or at 616-204-0719.