Abstract
At the heart of the religion and science discourse (the ‘SRD’) lies the idea that exploring differences between religion and science leads to creative insights about who we are and the world we live in. ‘Creative Pluralism’ in the SRD thus focuses on epistemic differences between religion and science. If we want to expand our discourse beyond the Western academy, and thereby more fully explore the creative possibilities between the territories of ‘religion’ and ‘science,’ we will need a deeper understanding of epistemic pluralism or, more to the point, a different approach to epistemic difference. I begin with a brief discussion of decolonial critiques of Western epistemology, focusing on claims to universality and the difficultly of constructively engaging with difference. I then describe two alternative approaches – beginning with the observation that epistemology shapes ontology (not the other way around) – the pluriverse, or a world of many worlds, and border thinking, or thinking between worlds. I conclude by describing Hannah Arendt’s method of ‘storytelling,’ an approach to multicultural conversations that addresses these two central critiques of decolonial theory by acknowledging the multiplicity of worlds, recognizing difference without privileging one world over another.
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Notes
- 1.
Just as the Ahwaneechee had more than one name for the mountain, they had multiple versions of the story – perhaps reflecting the diverse groups of people who shared the valley. The version of the story that I used here is one told by Julia Parker, the grandmother of Ronnie Lauk, an Ahwahneechee climber (see Parker 2019).
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Stenmark, L.L. (2022). Telling Stories in the Pluriverse: Decolonial Options for Creative Pluralism. In: Fuller, M., Evers, D., Runehov, A. (eds) Issues in Science and Theology: Creative Pluralism? . Issues in Science and Religion: Publications of the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06277-3_5
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