Diana Eck
Eck’s academic work has a dual focus India and America and in both cases she is interested in the challenges of religious pluralism in a multi-religious society. Her work on India includes studies of popular religion and pilgrimage including Banaras: City of Light, Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, and India: A Sacred Geography (forthcoming). Since 1991, she has headed the Pluralism Project, a student and faculty think-tank that explores and interprets the religious dimensions of America’s new immigration. The Pluralism Project looks especially at the growth of Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, and Jain communities in the United States and the new issues of religious pluralism and American civil society.
Eck on civil discourse, from “Civility in the Face of Organized Hostility”:
The past four years have seen the rise and media expansion of several groups in the United States organized specifically to oppose the presence and influence of Muslims in American society. The research of the Pluralism Project at Harvard over the past twenty years has documented the ways in which local communities have expressed apprehension about the building of Islamic centers and schools. What has changed in recent years is the move from local resistance based on “zoning” and “traffic” issues to a wider trans-local movement that articulates overt expressions of hostility to Islam and Muslims in America. In many cases, the focus of animosity is not toward “extremist” Muslims, but toward the very people who, as American Muslims, are respected participants in civil society. The rhetorical move is from concern about the jihad of extremists to the “stealth jihad” of Muslim citizens. Why has this happened? What are the sources of this hostility? What are the ways in which American Muslims have responded to the politics of attack, insinuation, and aspersion?
