The University of Pennsylvania’s Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society, directed by professor John DiIulio, first director of the Bush White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, has launched a new website that features a new “Common Ground for the Common Good” project on religious freedom and LGBT rights.

Rather than promising a resolution of contentious church-state disputes, the C2G2 project aims more modestly to “model how to disagree in the spirit of mutual respect that is essential to a healthy democracy.” And, of course, respectful and serious discussion may yield specific proposals for how to ensure substantial fairness for all sides.

The theme of the PRRUCS website and set of projects is a quotation from Benjamin Franklin: “To pour forth benefits for the common good is divine.”

The C2G2 section of the website features a video conversation between John DiIulio and the two co-directors of the C2G2 project, Stanley Carlson-Thies, founder and senior director of IRFA, and Marci Hamilton, professor at Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.

There are links in the PRRUCS website, in the “Surveys, Papers, and Videos” section, to religious freedom papers each recently wrote for the project. Dr. Carlson-Thies’ paper is “Living Together Despite, and With, Our Deep Differences About LGBT Rights and About the Legitimate Scope of Religious Freedom.”

Other participants in the C2G2 project include E.J. Dionne, Washington Post columnist; Ron Sider, author of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger and emeritus president of Evangelicals for Social Action; Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, former lieutenant governor of Maryland; Rev. Luis Cortez, president of Esperanza; Rev. Wilson Goode of Amachi; Michael Wear, formerly of the Obama faith-based office and election and re-election campaigns; Jane Eisnerthe of Forward; and Sister Mary Scullion of Project HOME.