Moscarítolo Palacio, Mortensen receive Interfaith America Curriculum Development Grant

Alessandro Moscarítolo Palacio and Kaija Mortensen

Comparative philosophy professors Alessandro Moscarítolo Palacio and Kaija Mortensen were recently announced as recipients of one of Interfaith America’s 2025-2026 Civic Pluralism Curriculum Development Grants. 

The grant program is designed to recognize campus leaders who are reimagining higher education by fostering pluralism in their classrooms. Interfaith America defines pluralism as proactively engaging diverse religious, spiritual, and secular identities to foster respectful relationships and a shared commitment to the common good.

Teams of two educators were invited to apply for the $4,000 grants to design and implement a course on theory and the application of pluralism, to be taught between January 2025 and May 2026. 

Moscarítolo Palacio and Mortensen were one of 11 teams chosen. 

Their proposed course is tentatively called the Ethics of Disagreement and will focus on what they describe as a foundational question in the realm of civic pluralism: How can we have meaningful conversations with people who are very different from us?

The goal is to create a learning environment where students can practice navigating differences. 

“The purpose is to bring theoretical philosophy to bear on a practical problem,” Moscarítolo Palacio said. “Equally importantly, we want to empower our students to apply the discussions we have in class in real-life scenarios.” 

Their collaboration also exemplifies the spirit of the grant. 

“Part of the application was to have two professors who have some deep difference, or multiple differences, come together to teach a course,” Mortensen said. “We have these differences, as well as a shared commitment to the power of philosophy to be a site for having these difficult conversations and navigating our way through them.”

The course, which they expect to teach during the spring of 2026, is part of the comparative philosophy department’s Public Philosophy Initiative, a larger project Moscarítolo Palacio is leading at the college. 

“The Public Philosophy Initiative is aimed at doing what I said about the course, but at a larger scale,” he said. “That is, bringing philosophy to bear on challenging social realities.” 

The initiative includes a series of events, including panel discussions organized by students, service-learning courses, and a podcast to make the work they’re doing accessible to all. 

“I know there’s hunger in this community among our students for these sorts of initiatives,” Moscarítolo Palacio. “Amongst humanities students and philosophy students, in particular, they want to do something that brings about actual change.”