Intellectual Solidarity

EJ Dionne, Jr of WaPO lays out the challenge before atheists and believers alike--intellectual solidarity--a belief that faith or disbelief compells you to engage and interact with others in the hopes of learning and understaning the world anew.

"But the Jesuit theologian David Hollenbach puts an interesting twist on that adaptation. Religious liberty, he argues, must be rooted not merely in "tolerance" but in what he calls "intellectual solidarity."

Tolerance, he notes, is 'a strategy of noninterference with the beliefs and lifestyles of those who are different or 'other.' " That is the classic Enlightenment view. Intellectual solidarity demands more, he says. It "entails engagement with the other . . . in the hope that understanding might replace incomprehension and that perhaps even agreement could result.' "