ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that one can build community in a culturally diverse world, that that community can be pluralistic and tolerant, and that religious believers have an important role in building and extending it. It looks at what community is, and what kinds of conditions have to be present for organized social life to be possible. The chapter focuses on some insights into the nature of community that one finds in idealist philosophers such as T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, and Leslie Armour. It also argues that, despite the diversity of discourses and ways of seeing and understanding the world, there are ways of bringing different ‘final vocabularies’ into contact, that there are norms for judging commitments, beliefs, and values as ‘true’ and ‘false,’ or as ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate,’ and that these provide a starting point for building community.
