{"id":1385,"date":"2010-05-17T09:17:51","date_gmt":"2010-05-17T13:17:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.therowboat.com\/?p=1385"},"modified":"2010-05-17T09:21:33","modified_gmt":"2010-05-17T13:21:33","slug":"the-significance-of-borders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/2010\/05\/the-significance-of-borders\/","title":{"rendered":"The Significance of Borders"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"In an attempt to tame the back-and-forth we had on Bloggingheads recently<\/a>, religious and philosophical ethicist Richard Amesbury and I have a text interview today at The Immanent Frame<\/a>, which covers a similarly broad range of themes: human rights, the definition of religion, and New Atheism.<\/p>\n

NS: Is there something that, above all, ties together your interests in international relations and philosophy of religion?<\/p>\n

RA: I\u2019m interested in the significance of borders\u2014the lines we draw between in-groups and out-groups. The concept of \u201creligion,\u201d like that of the nation, represents an attempt to articulate a collective \u201cwe,\u201d in opposition to perceived alterity. In the United States\u2014though not only here\u2014these two ideas have reinforced and shaped each other in interesting and problematic ways. Yet, because they can be imagined differently, for different purposes, religions and nations are also sites of ongoing conflict, whose boundaries are always subject to renegotiation. The goal of a social critic, as I see it, is not to eliminate exclusions\u2014these are inevitable\u2014but to render the operations of power visible and contestable. The moral ideal of human rights is important to this task because it reminds us that every construction of collective identity is ultimately contingent and in tension with our common humanity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"\"In an attempt to tame the back-and-forth we had on Bloggingheads recently<\/a>, religious and philosophical ethicist Richard Amesbury and I have a text interview today at The Immanent Frame<\/a>, which covers a similarly broad range of themes: human rights, the definition of religion, and New Atheism.<\/p>\n

NS: Is there something that, above all, ties together your interests in international relations and philosophy of religion?<\/p>\n

RA: I\u2019m interested in the significance of borders\u2014the lines we draw between in-groups and out-groups. The concept of \u201creligion,\u201d like that of the nation, represents an attempt to articulate a collective \u201cwe,\u201d in opposition to perceived alterity. In the United States\u2014though not only here\u2014these two ideas have reinforced and shaped each other in interesting and problematic ways. Yet, because they can be imagined differently, for different purposes, religions and nations are also sites of ongoing conflict, whose boundaries are always subject to renegotiation. The goal of a social critic, as I see it, is not to eliminate exclusions\u2014these are inevitable\u2014but to render the operations of power visible and contestable. The moral ideal of human rights is important to this task because it reminds us that every construction of collective identity is ultimately contingent and in tension with our common humanity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[37,54,84,56],"class_list":["post-1385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-atheism","tag-conversation","tag-ethics","tag-human-rights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1385"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1388,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1385\/revisions\/1388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}