ABSTRACT
Let’s start with the proposals offered by critical practitioners and secular professionals in this book to facilitate a more constructive dialogue. Bill Johnston makes a distinction between exploratory dialogue and conciliatory dialogue. While the latter “concerns itself with overcoming misconceptions and prejudices on either side,” exploratory dialogue performs “the dual function of giving participants voice and allowing exposure to the voices of others, leading to the mutual shaping of ideas and views” (p. 36). Johnston considers exploratory dialogue irrelevant and even impossible for the parties under consideration in this book, as CET are too entrenched in their positions to dialogue with others.1 He rather favors conciliatory dialogue, as the best CET and non-CET professionals can hope to achieve is understanding each other’s positions in an effort to overcome misconceptions and prejudices on either side. Though Johnston makes a useful distinction and points to the higher forms of dialogue that all PPE should aspire to, I would question his assumption that some groups are not capable of exploratory dialogue or that they don’t qualify for that level of interaction. We have to be careful of either holding out or refusing exploratory dialogue for selected parties. Where do we draw the line? How do we decide that some are open for dialogue with us but not others? Would this distinction be based on our biases for or against certain groups? Isn’t there a logical slippage when we say we are open to dialogue with groups that have values different from ours, but some are more preferable than others for higher forms of dialogue? Would this become a self-fulfilling prophecy of having some groups always excluded from dialogue-i.e., when we exclude certain groups because their values are too far from our preferred positions, they will always remain misunderstood and unappreciated and, thus, excluded from dialogue? Though conciliatory dialogue is always needed as a way of clearing the air between debating parties, it doesn’t have to be the end point in any dialogue.
