The Possibilities and Limits of Inter-Religious Dialogue

This chapter reports on a twenty-year experiment in “scriptural reasoning,” a type of inter-religious dialogue that emerges from places of maximal warmth and potential fire—“hearths”—within each participating religious community. It also explores how this dialogue is being adapted for peacebuilding efforts in regions of inter-religious violence. The goal of scriptural reasoning (SR) is to nurture “hearth-to-hearth” dialogue that summons the warmth of each hearth as a resource for conflict reduction, without at the same time stoking the fire. This is potentially the most dangerous form of inter-religious dialogue. This chapter argues, however, that it is also the one that, when handled properly, is most likely to contribute to long-term conflict transformation.

The Place of Religious Freedom in the Structure of Peacebuilding

This chapter analyzes the role that the fundamental right to freedom of religion or belief plays in ending or averting religious warfare, and in providing necessary footings for crystallizing peace out of conflict. After stressing that there is a tendency to lay exaggerated blame for many conflicts on religion, the chapter explores the Lockean insight that under certain circumstances, religious pluralism can serve as a stabilizing factor in society if states protect the right to religious diversity instead of imposing homogeneity. International limitation clauses on the scope of religious liberty play an important filtering role in promoting the positive contributions religion makes to society, while constraining negative religious effects. The analysis argues that secularity, understood as a framework welcoming religious pluralism, rather than secularism, as an ideology advocating secularization as an end in itself, is most conducive to the peacebuilding potential of religious freedom.

Violent and Nonviolent Religious Militancy

This chapter explores religious militancy as a multivalent phenomenon that includes both violent and nonviolent expressions. Religious militancy has too frequently been equated with violence in popular opinion and scholarly writing alike, a trend that has both marginalized and delegitimized the contributions of nonviolent religious actors. A brief examination of the civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth-century United States illustrates how religion motivated activists on both sides of the debate, moving them toward either extreme violence or radical peace. Religiously militant peacebuilders can build upon the notion of “justpeace” to develop a comprehensive approach to addressing the multiple forms of violence, seeking not only to counter the influence of violent religious extremists but ultimately to win the internal argument within each host religious tradition.

Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding

This synthetic chapter describes the contributions to the Oxford Handbook on Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, putting them in tension with one another through a consideration of larger orienting themes. One such theme is the tension between the liberal peace and justpeace paradigms. Another orienting thread in this synthesis is a more expansive interpretation of violence and the relevance of not only direct and acute violence but also structural and cultural modes of violence to the analysis of religion, conflict, and peacebuilding. A related dimension of an expansive interpretation of religion and violence invites a discussion of the tool of discursive critique and scrutiny of the conventional categories informing theorizing about religion and political violence. Finally, the chapter discusses some of the tension emerging in the field between theory and practice as well as between global and local meanings, agendas, and theories of change. The synthesis proceeds with a careful effort to locate the contributions within a broader landscape of debates about modernism, secularism, and the so-called resurgence of religion.

Religious Communities and Possibilities for Justpeace

This chapter analyzes religious communities’ role in peacebuilding vis-à-vis dominant political and economic discourses of the colonial past and the postcolonial present. This comparison demonstrates that such dominant discourses—of colonial expansion for “civilizing” purposes in the past, and for neoliberal modes of economic structuring in the context of the global war on terror in the present—entangle both strategic peacebuilders and religious communities. It is critically necessary, therefore, for peacebuilders to practice reflexivity about their own assumptions, connections, and relationships with all actors and processes in the peacebuilding environment. They should constantly interrogate whether and how the experiences of the past shape problems, strategies, and/or attitudes toward societies in conflict in the present. Moreover, religious communities and strategic peacebuilders should reclaim the prophetic voice extant in all religious traditions to challenge more directly the unjust economic, political, and social structures that inhibit the advancement of justpeace.

The Intersection of Christian Theology and Peacebuilding

This chapter argues that without explicit, theoretically robust, and practically grounded theological reflection, scholarship and practice tend to neglect significant dimensions of existing—and potential—peacebuilding. First, it explicates how theological method can help peacebuilders to counter positivist and secularist assumptions that often eclipse religious, spiritual, existential, psychic, and emotional experiences that are relevant to naming and healing violence. Second, it uses theological analysis to explore ways in which the Mennonite sociolinguistic community of peacebuilder John Paul Lederach contributes to social theory he developed in contradistinction to the liberal peace. Specifically, the chapter identifies eschatological influences in Lederach’s signature notions of “expansive time” and the “beckoning horizon.” Harnessing the strategic peacebuilding paradigm’s inclusion of multiple sociolinguistic communities, the chapter encourages more extensive conversation between peacebuilding and the discipline of theology.

Secular Militancy as an Obstacle to Peacebuilding

“Persistent unsecularity” more accurately represents the dynamic relationship between religion, modernization, and society in the contemporary world than the secularization paradigm. Secularization is flawed on several counts. It infuses vague concepts like “modernity” and “rationality” with transcendent and irreversible agency, pitting them against religion in a zero-sum conflict that is both self-contradictory and unfalsifiable. In fact, the secularization paradigm is itself a religious worldview, supporting the claim that human persons naturally seek to infuse their lives—as individuals and in community—with unsecular interpretations, activities, and engagement. Despite claims to the contrary, religious structures, frameworks, symbols, and actors are powerfully present in the realities of conflict, violence, and peacemaking around the globe today, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Structural and Cultural Violence in Religion and Peacebuilding

This chapter makes the case for the necessity of a multi-focal conception of violence in religion and peacebuilding. It first traces the emergence and development of the analytical concepts of structural and cultural violence in peace studies, demonstrating how these lenses draw central insights from, but also differ from and improve upon, critical theory and reflexive sociology. It argues that addressing structural and cultural forms of violence—perhaps especially in non-deadly manifestations—are concerns as central as addressing direct (explicit, personal) and deadly forms of violence for building just and sustainable peace. It argues, further, that religiously informed and/or motivated peacebuilders are especially well-appointed and equipped to identify and address violence in its structural and cultural manifestations. The chapter then examines how concepts of structural and cultural violence centrally inform the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. and Cornel West to cultivate just and sustainable peace in a context as putatively peaceful and prosperous as the United States.

Secular-Religious Encounters as Peacebuilding

This chapter seeks to broaden the focus of peace studies in its considerations of religious-secular relations by retrieving a thicker meaning of secularism. According to an emerging consensus in the field of peace studies, the secularist paradigm has long excluded religious actors from peacebuilding. This chapter argues that although critique of this dynamic and the larger critique of secularism are necessary the field of peace studies must also move beyond them and probe the potential of the encounters between secular and religious actors for building justpeace. By considering Solidarity, a 1980s social movement in Communist Poland, the chapter retrieves a more nuanced meaning of secular agency and secularism and expands the horizons of peace studies in two ways. First, it describes the possibilities of religious-secular encounters among local actors in civil society and rather than on the levels of states or religious institutions. Second, the chapter retrieves a form of secularism that is not just a matter of power or ideology but a a moral orientation and practice that discloses rather than legitimizes state power.

Religion, Nationalism, and the Politics of Secularism

This chapter examines the relationship between religion, nationalism, and the state and advocates a truly neutral conception of secularism. The point of departure is an analysis of the recurring debate over the proper role of religion in public life. Particular attention is given to the relationship between religion and nationalism, the secularization thesis, and the reasons religion remains an important part of modern politics. The chapter then turns toward the “politics of secularism,” and the tension between liberal (or ecumenical) secularism in theory and its practice. At issue is whether the secular tradition is invariably exclusive, or whether secularism as implemented has simply failed to live up to its ecumenical promise. The closing section examines this question in light of the justpeace tradition, and offers an endorsement for a re-conceptualized vision of secularism that is genuinely defined by neutrality in matters of religion and belief.