The International Summer School on Religion and Public Life provides a laboratory for the practical pedagogy of tolerance and living with difference in a global society. Its goals are to produce new practices and understandings for living together in a world populated by people with very different political ideas, moral beliefs and communal loyalties. Its focus is on religion, as our religious identities are our most exclusive and our religious communities are those to which we devote our greatest loyalties. In our diverse but increasingly interconnected world, we need to find ways to live together. The school takes these very real, critical and defining differences, especially communal and religious differences between people, as the starting point of a publically shared life.

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• For 2013, the ISSRPL will be working to support the efforts of our affiliate programs in Bulgaria, Canada, and Uganda, alongside the development of future programs. As well, in April 2013 we will be hosting a workshop for past and future program directors, in cooperation with the Institute on Culture, Religion & World Affairs at Boston University, to develop broader pedagogical implications of the ISSRPL method.

• The Equator Peace Academy, an ISSRPL-Affiliate School, hosted its first international program, Whose Community? Memory, Conflict and Tradition, in Uganda and Rwanda from 2-15 December 2012.

• The Balkan Summer School on Religion and Public Life, an ISSRPL-Affiliate School, will be hosting its biennial international program, Syncretic Societies: Bridging Traditions and Modernity?, in Bulgaria from 10-24 August 2013.

• The Connaught Summer Institute on Islamic Studies, an ISSRPL-Affiliate School, will be hosting its program on Islamic studies and research design in Canada from 12-22 August 2013.

• For more on the ISSRPL, see recent articles by Andrew Thurston, “Tolerate Thy Neighbor;” Nick Thorpe, "In a Divided Land, Lessons in Living Together;" and Rahel Wasserfall, "Eating Together: The Hidden Story of the ISSRPL." See also the ISSRPL Occasional Paper Series for reflections of past fellows on the ISSRPL program.