The 2006 Baker Peace Conference ended Friday with three panel discussions that focused on the relationship between religion and violence and unrest in the Middle East. Religion as a Source of Violence
In the first panel discussion, a University of Chicago professor examined the conflict identities embedded in religious texts.
Iconoclasm, the overturning of traditional beliefs and values, the challenge of religious and global commercialization and the misinterpretation of the religious tradition are some of the main causes of violence in the Middle East, said Michael Sells, the John Henry Barrow professor of the History and Literature of Islam in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago.
Western commercialization is overpowering, Sells said. Those people (in the Middle East) become enslaved in that imagery.
Author Bat Yeor, an expert on Jewish and Christian ideologies, used jihad violence in the Middle East as an example of how violence occurs because of religion. This happens quite often but is not known, Yeor said. It promotes a lot of suffering among people.
Going beyond the Middle East, professor J. Daryl Charles of Union University, Jackson, Tenn., said religious ideology inevitably influences law enforcement in many societies. Charles, who has had experience with the U.S. law enforcement system, said it is in the Middle East, however, that retribution and revenge enter into law enforcement practices. By using law enforcement to avenge based on religion leads to even more violence, he said. Natalie FarinacciReligion and Peacemaking
In the second panel of Fridays conference, three speakers examined the role religion has in creating peace.
James Felak, associate professor of East European history at the University of Washington, explained papal policy in the peacemaking process.
Papal involvement in times of war stresses humanitarianism, impartiality and international and inter-religious dialogue, but is often constrained by non-Catholic regimes who do not recognize the pope as a leader, politicians with vested interests and groups impervious to outreach, Felak said.
Asking if religion provokes violence is a bad question because it diverts attention from our own bloodiness and the violence we share as human beings, said Paul J. Griffiths, Arthur J. Schmitt chair of Catholic Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
Only small proportions of deliberate killing have been provoked by religious passions and religion has been made in a form subordinate to the state or external powers, Griffiths said.
To move forward, there is a need for leadership that models peacemaking and engaged pacifism, said Charles Kimball, professor of religion and comparative religion at the Divinity School of Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, N.C.
Through education, self-awareness and ecumenism we find important keys that help us see that we are not simply citizens of a country but human beings of a planet and all part of Gods creation, Kimball said. Maria GallucciThe Debate on Just War
Democracies victimize civilians in war about as often as other types of states, said Alexander Downes, an assistant professor of political science at Duke University, Durham, N.C., at the final panel of the conference.
Downes conclusion drew criticism from panel member James Turner Johnson, a proponent of the just war tradition, which originated in the Hebrew Bible as an attempt to determine acceptable grounds for starting a war and acceptable behavior in combat.
Civilian victimization is less common now than the Downes study suggests because of the revival of the just war tradition, Johnson said.
Because of this revival, states particularly democratic ones fight wars more justly than they did in most of the wars in Downes study, he said.
There is no just war discourse really prior to the 1960s, Johnson said. The just war tradition went into suspended animation.
But nations might have committed fewer casualties in recent years because they have fought less expensive wars, Downes said. A military targets civilians when it is desperate to win a war without expending too much money and life, he said.
It is desperate either to weaken the morale of the other side or to undermine its ability to keep fighting, he said.
A major problem with just war theory is that it is abandoned in desperate straits because killing civilians is economically advantageous, said Stanley Hauerwas, a professor of theological ethics at Duke University.
Hauerwas, a noted pacifist, said war seems inevitable because history portrays it as heroic.
War is inevitable because we cannot imagine writing the history of who we are without it, he said. Sam Stephens
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