Speaking Across Differences: Navigating dialogue in polarized times

Upcoming Minicourses

May 07, 2025 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM Weekly On Wednesday For 3 Times

Online Via Zoom

This course will interrogate the question of what it means to dialogue during a time of political violence, persecution, gaslighting, and oppression. Very often we teach that tolerance is a virtue in dialogue, yet should we also be tolerant of intolerance? How does that work?

The concept of tolerance in philosophy is often elusive and, at times, replete with paradoxes and antinomies. How does our dialogical obligation to the Other reconcile our civic responsibility to oppose what we perceive to be unethical and irresponsible beliefs, behaviors, or policies? Can we dialogue when we perceive our Other as either complicit with, or worse a perpetrator of the very worldviews that support and condone hatred and violence?

We will consider a variety of views and try to chart a new dialogical path together by examining how different philosophers, political theorists, historians, and theologians have broached these questions during their own times of political peril.

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About the Presenter

Benjamin E. Sax, Ph D.

Ben Sax is the Jewish Scholar and Head of Scholarship at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore. Ben is an experienced professor, university administrator, scholar, award-winning teacher, public speaker, and practitioner and facilitator of interreligious dialogue. Ben holds degrees from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (B.A., Social Thought and Political Economy), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (M.A., Jewish Thought), and the University of Chicago (Ph.D., History of Judaism). He also studied at Middlebury College’s Summer Language School, where he received a Zertifikat ÖSD Mittelstufe, M.D. in German Language and Culture.