A controversy recently erupted at Harvard when students tried to broadcast the adhan, a traditional Muslim call to prayer, on campus. Some thought of it as school-sponsored proselytizing. Writing for the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier disagrees. Although Weiseltier is Jewish, he writes about how he is able to find beauty in calls to prayer, even if they’re not from his religion. “An open civil space will always be cacophonous,” he writes. “There will be affirmation and alienation, sometimes even within a single individual; and there will be indifference, which is in its way one of the accomplishments of pluralism.” On a college campuses especially, people should be exposed to different religions, hopefully learning to appreciate some beauty in all of them.

—Bennett Gordon