Schleiermacher and "Religious Others"

Friedrich Schleiermacher has often been credited with being the most influential modern founder/articulator/theorist of practical theology. I do not wish to go into the strengths and limits of such a claim, but rather to call attention to a recent book that will be important for all whose theological work is heir to Schleiermacher’s prodigious and capacious oeuvre.
I recently read the new book by David R. Brockman,  No Longer the Same: Religious Others and the Liberation of Christian Theology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). In this book, Prof. Brockman builds on the work of theologian Joerg Rieger and philosopher Alain Badiou to construct an analytical scheme by which he can suss out the place of “religious others” in the theologies of Schleiermacher, Gustavo Gutierrez, Karl Barth, and George Lindbeck. Prof. Brockman shows just how much these influential theologians, who influenced entire schools of contemporary thought and practice, rely on conceptions of “religious others” to validate or vindicate their theology. At the same time, those religious others are nearly or entirely silent/silenced within these respective theological projects.
Because Schleiermacher’s work (on practical theology, religious experience and more) is so often discussed or presumed in practical theology, this book (and particularly Prof. Brockman’s balanced discussion of Schleiermacher) merits careful reading by practical theologians. And the sobering conclusion to the chapter on Schleiermacher stands for a larger challenge that confronts (Christian and Christian-influenced) practical theology today: “Schleiermacher’s handling of the concept ‘religion’ becomes a way to block, not to facilitate, encounter with those who are different.” (p. 55)
This is important because it goes right to the ways, and the heritage of those ways, that we predicate the theological/religious meaning of practice in the field. I am trying to take this question up in my current work.
Tom Beaudoin, Fordham University