Prof. Dr. Dr. Ulrich Hemel gave a talk on “Good Religious Practice as the 18th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 18)” at a digital conference of the Central Committee of German Catholics on July 14. The talk took place as part of a meeting of the “Christians and Muslims” working group. Religious peace paradox – How do universal norms and religious diversity fit together?Against the background of interreligious conflicts worldwide and the claim of religions to bring about peace, the theologian and economist Hemel formulated it as a social learning task to promote religion capable of democracy and democracies capable of religion. The value of the global ethic idea and of interreligious competence should not be underestimated for peaceful coexistence, said Ulrich Hemel. “Religious claims to validity and controversies are not an argument against peaceful coexistence. They show that we must take seriously the importance of religion for sociocultural and personal identity formation, recognize the plurality of religious worlds and the plurality of political worlds, and derive global minimum standards for dialogue skills from this. Of course, this also means that we need an active debate about the common limits of tolerance.” Prof. Dr. Dr. Ulrich Hemel has been director of the Global Ethic Institute since 2018. A year earlier, he was elected president of the Federation of Catholic Entrepreneurs (BKU), and on October 2, 2020, he was re-elected as federal president for another three years. In 2020, he was also elected as a member of the ZdK (=Zentralkomitee der Katholiken in Deutschland) as a member of Forum IV (“Power and Violence”) in the Synodal Way of the Catholic Church in Germany and is specifically committed to a reform of church finances oriented towards transparency and professionalism.