Introduction

Symposium and Report Credits

Symposium participants were asked, in the morning discussions, to consider the consequences - positive, negative, or both - of changing religion's role in public life. This question elicited dozens of responses, many of them similar.

In some cases, the imagined pros and cons were perfect mirror images of one another. Religion can, one person said, "inform one's vision of justice;" it also might, another responded, "destroy one's vision of justice." One thought it would "promote tolerance;" another suspected it would promote intolerance.

Religion is clearly a double-edged sword.