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Must Civilizations Clash?
posted on June 7, 2012For The New Republic, Barry Gewen reviews Daniel Philpott’s new book, Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation. Gewen asserts that Philpott’s new work “can be read as a book-length response” to the “clash of civilizations” thesis, made famous by the late Samuel Huntington. Philpott argues that emphasizing religions’ shared “common ground” (especially the common grown of the three Abrahamic faiths) can facilitate culture-based reconciliation, and forestall what Huntington predicated was the inevitable clash of cultures. “Just and Unjust Peace is a book of optimism, of hope,” Gewen writes, “of insistently seeing the glass as half full. Humane but not fatuous or sappy, it is the exit ramp off Apocalypse Highway.”