Franz Magnis-Suseno, Dialogue Ethics and Public Reasoning of Religions

Abstract The return of religion in politics is an important issue in a contemporary democracy. Franz Magnis-Suseno, a Jesuit, ethician and interfaith figure in Indonesia, provides a raft of interesting insights for interreligious dialogues in a pluralistic democracy. Through his publications, he seeks to assist Muslims and Christians to build an ethics of citizenship in a pluralistic democracy with the second Vatican theology of religions as his intellectual foundation. In this article, the author attempts to reconstruct the important points of Magnis-Suseno’s thoughts on dialogue ethics and identifies their relationships to the public reasoning of religions in a political public sphere. He comments that Magnis-Suseno demands more of religions than do Rawls and Habermas in terms of moderating their doctrinal positions vis-à-vis other religions.