One of the great challenges of pluralism is letting others use their own vocabulary to describe themselves and then engaging those vocabularies rather than suppressing them.
The various supremacies that suffuse our cultures—along lines of gender, race, sexuality, religion, class, and others—have a habit of sneaking in around the edges even when we want to disrupt them.
Take, for example, theologian Paul Tillich’s idea that everyone’s ultimate concern should be called god.
Choosing the term god for others is not engaging with the full range of religious and nonreligious vocabularies through which pluralism thrives.
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