In both the world and America of today, living with and accepting difference has emerged as one of the most salient of all public issues. Indeed, more and more policy makers, religious leaders and concerned citizens are coming to realize the challenge of difference, especially at the point of its intersection with religious and national beliefs and practices. What was once taken as a relatively unproblematic solution (of liberal-secularism) to living with difference is now seen as fraught with difficulties on both the theoretical and practical levels. This seminar aims to understand these problems to a fuller extent than mere classroom learning could provide, and it hopes to begin charting some preliminary paths towards their solution. This seminar will be conducted as a collective pursuit of knowledge. Such a collective pursuit, we believe, is the very first step to a proper understanding of the problem itself. The purpose of this seminar is thus to teach students and future communal and religious leaders how to "live with difference" without either privatizing difference, or claiming an essential "sameness" as the basis of shared social life. Rather than such approaches, the seminar places difference squarely at the top of the agenda. In fact, the key to this seminar and workshop is the requirement of all participants to confront one another's differences--and then learn how to live with them anyway. In two intensive weeks (bracketed by more formal learning situations and project development), students will experience unfamiliar religious customs, grapple with beliefs that contradict their own, re-examine lifelong assumptions, and figure out how to share time and space.