The Habits of Race and Faith in a Religiously Diverse World

Mara Brecht does not just provide a cogent analysis of how white racial privilege plays out in interreligious encounter. This book also draws its readers into a multi-layered process of interreligious self-reflectiveness—a process born out of the author’s own well-honed classroom pedagogy. Trenchant yet devoid of rhetorical bombast, Dr. Brecht’s critique of Christian soteriological superiority is a must read for scholars and students alike.

-- Margaret D. Kamitsuka, Oberlin College, Ohio

The Habits of Race and Faith in a Religiously Diverse World is a balanced, integral work of Christian theology that challenges every reader to think about race, privilege and interreligious learning as necessarily interrelated concerns. Well-grounded in Catholic tradition and alert to the too-often hidden vice of white privilege, Mara Brecht brings to this highly readable volume vivid classroom examples, a distinctive personal voice, and candor about the challenges facing real-world interreligious learning of the mid-21st century and beyond.

-- Francis X. Clooney, SJ, Harvard Divinity School

Mara Brecht's analysis of the entanglements of racialization and Christian attitudes about religious diversity reaches far beyond the US Catholic context from which she writes. As a teacher, she is methodical, philosophically precise, and attentive to embodied experience at every step. Emphasizing habit formation rather than inevitability or blame, she issues a challenge that provides grounds for hope and change.

-- Michelle Voss, Emmanuel College, Toronto School of Theo