塔玛拉·索恩：通往宽容的道路
塔玛拉比如说威廉玛丽学院（College of William and Mary）人文与宗教研究的凯南教授，在促进世界宗教宽容与理解的努力中确立了自己的前沿地位。 她的做法是：消除恐惧。
“Religious intolerance is a major problem,” she said. “Intolerance often comes from fear, and by learning about the religious other, by working with the religious other, the fear dissipates. It’s replaced by knowledge and understanding. Tolerance is the result.”
在最近的一次录像采访中，索恩从美国宪法中嵌入的价值观的角度谈到了她自己的身份，并提供了她如何试图进一步影响这些价值观的见解。 她说，这些价值观源于承认个人权利的人人平等的概念。
“As an American, my identity is those values,” she said. “Like most Americans, I have multiple ethnicities in the deep recesses of background, from even before the Revolution, so I don’t have the leisure of falling back on some ethnicity other than being American.”
作为一名研究过多种宗教和多种世界历史的学者，她了解到，与传统内部相比，相似的价值观更有可能在不同的传统中出现。
“I figure the best way for me to promote my purposes is to find as many people as I can across the cultures and across religions so that we can recognize each other and have strength in numbers and possibly drown out the voices of intolerance and hatred in all traditions,” she said.
Sonn, whose areas of scholarly specialization include Islamic intellectual history and contemporary issues in Islam, has written numerous books, including Interpreting Islam: Bandali Jawzi’s Islamic Intellectual History, Islam and the Question of Minotiries, Comparing Religions through Law: Judaism and Islam and Judaism and Islam in Practice, among other titles. 此外，她还是美国伊斯兰社会研究委员会的前任主席，乔治城大学穆斯林-基督教理解中心的学术顾问委员会成员，以及《穆斯林世界》、《美国伊斯兰社会科学杂志》和其他出版物的编辑委员会成员。