Mike Grimshaw’s paper, “On Canaries, Icebergs and the public sphere: The pragmatic compromise of religious pluralism” was published in the Indonesian journal Khazanah Theologia.
As our societies become increasingly religiously and culturally diverse, there is a growing sense amongst many, including religious people and thinkers, that the old multi-cultural options may need to be either rethought, or in fact rejected in favour of cosmopolitan possibilities. Yet in any attempt to engage with issues of pluralism, secularity, religion and public space we need to consider the actual and contextual environments in which these debates, actions and issues are played out. For at heart we are dealing with people in praxis. This paper argues for a series of pragmatic, ground-up – and grounded – responses and possibilities. It is a defence of the secular state and the secular society, perhaps not as it has been traditionally imagined; but perhaps the way it is – and can be – increasingly experienced, using the central metaphors of ‘the iceberg’ and ‘the canary’.
The paper is available at the following link: https://journal.uinsgd.ac.id/index.php/kt/article/view/20508
