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Struggling to Establish Jewish-Muslim Dialogue in a Paris Synagogue after the 2015 Attacks

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Both engaging in and researching interreligious dialogue initiatives after the 2015 Paris attacks among people who associate strongly with Jewish and Muslim communal structures provides a valuable framework for considering one of the central puzzles in the sociology of religion, namely, social transformations that apply not only to the observed but also to the observer. However, scholarship on interreligious dialogue does not have any well-established research episteme from which to proceed analytically. Academic doxa places interreligious dialogue initiatives in the realm of the “practical” and at times doctrinal, but not the rigorously analytical. These initiatives are often referred to in the English-speaking world as “interfaith,” a word which encompasses a vast array of voluntarist encounters across time and space. The underlying assumption of the academy is that researching dialogue initiatives is a form of “action-research,” a results-oriented mode of scholarship constrained by the necessity to obtain “best practice,” which is of little prestige or value to academics and intellectuals (Bielo 2018: 28). Moreover, since these initiatives have thus far often involved top-down practices, receiving their impetus from the state or dominant religious structures, they have lacked societal legitimacy and therefore have been of little interest to sociology.

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10

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32-48

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Link to article (paywalled), Struggling to Establish Jewish-Muslim Dialogue in a Paris Synagogue after the 2015 Attacks

Bibliographic Information

Everett, Samuel Sami Struggling to Establish Jewish-Muslim Dialogue in a Paris Synagogue after the 2015 Attacks. Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion. 2019: 32-48.  https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1163/9789004401266_004