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. This chapter compares observations from two studies of religious and religio-ethnic communities. The more recent is a qualitative study of American Jews\u27 understandings and experiences of anti-Semitism and how it relates to politics, particularly around the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. It compares some of the findings from this study with findings that emerged in earlier ethnographic research on debates about homosexuality within the United Methodist Church. The chapter explores the intersection of politics with the self, which sociological theories of the self have generally ignored