Difficult Dialogues: The Technologies and Limits of Reconciliation

Projects known as dialogue or reconciliation build on the common ground between members of historically adversarial groups to help overcome vicious cycles of retaliation. They do so by helping people to relate, in Martin Buber's (1970 [1923]) sense of the term, to those they perceive as "Other, " and thus to transform through interaction how they define themselves. While some posit that the deep interpersonal understanding that reconciliation fosters is actu-ally central to most or all religious traditions, reconciliation projects can also facilitate a mode of non-institutional spirituality, thus inviting us to explore one of the sociology of religion's "edges " this volume seeks to re-center. In this mode, participants may see institutional religion as fallible and human but see reconciliation as bringing contact with something transcendent and universal-a truth long known in their particular religious heritage, and oth-ers as well, but forgotten in many institutions. Such reconciliation projects may be experienced as "spiritual " rather than "religious, " transforming selves precisely by bringing together people who might normally be institution