Thinking About Religion and Violence

(By Jason C. Bivins)

Size	21 MB (21,080 KB)
Format	PDF
Downloaded	584 times
Status	Available
Last checked	8 Hour ago!
Author	Jason C. Bivins

“Book Descriptions: What is it that causes some people to commit violent acts in the name of religion, either against themselves or others? Why does violence even play a role in religion to begin with? How can theology, as well as history, sociology, and other frameworks, help us grasp the nature of religious violence? All religions, including the world’s great faiths—Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism—have their inner battles with violent beliefs and practices. And, in a world where violence in the name of religion can impact so many other people’s lives, it’s critical to understand the intersection between the two.

Perhaps the biggest obstacles to this understanding lie in fear, sensationalism, and dismissal, all of which can prevent you from truly grasping the nature of religious violence. What’s required is not to see religion as inherently violent, but to recognize that the violence associated with religious groups and communities is worth exploring and interrogating. It’s about examining whether religious violence is an indelible part of the human experience or a problem we can truly solve.

“If we want to know why ‘bad stuff’ happens in the name of religion, we need to understand how those who commit religious violence perceive what they’re doing,” says Dr. Jason C. Bivins, award-winning professor of Religious Studies at North Carolina State University. “That’s the best way to understand why our world is producing so much of it, and what we can do about it.”

In his 24-lecture course, Thinking about Religion and Violence, Professor Bivins takes you on a global, historical, and multidisciplinary investigation of religious violence. Delivered with honesty and sensitivity to the diversity of spiritual beliefs, he examines the roots of this phenomenon and guides you toward more informed ways of thinking about it. You’ll consider how faiths like Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism view concepts like human sacrifice, martyrdom, penitence, and means of violence; the ways religious violence can be directed toward specific races, genders, and cultural groups; the connections between violence and other religions, including Mormonism and Native American faiths; concepts like heresy, demonology, and witch-hunting; and more. Blending history, theology, psychology, sociology, and other fields, Professor Bivins helps you get to the heart of a complex problem that’s broader and deeper (and more optimistic) than you might have thought.

Learn How to Talk about Religious Violence

At the heart of Thinking about Religion and Violence is this central question: What sources shape and feed violent habits of mind and, in turn, the violence that sometimes follows from them?

To start, Professor Bivins grounds his lectures in the central concepts and ideas you’ll need for understanding the subject, mastering the flexibility with which we need to talk about religious violence responsibly, and fashioning your own interpretations. These topics include:

Religion: It’s critical to remember that religion doesn’t exist in a vacuum. However you choose to define it, religion is always mixed up with factors ranging from biology to culture to geography to class. One can’t simply say: “Religion made them do it.” One must look to the role played by culture, society, and the media—whether we’d like to or not.
Violence: Like religion, violence doesn’t exist in a vacuum but is related to politics, human bodies, economics, sex, and law. Violence is also about a kind of forcibly changed relationship between persons and communities (usually in public) and, therefore, quite often impacts the most deeply held beliefs of the people involved.
Other-ing: This term refers to the cultural construction of an enemy figure rooted in older cultural convictions, social hierarchies, and caricatures of different classes of people, all of which draw support from religions (even as religions critique them). The viewpoint of “other-ing” is at the root of concepts related to religious violence like scapegoats, demons, and anti-Semitism.
Cult: Many of the groups regarded as cults emerge from, or end up in, the religious mainstream. An objective definition of a cult involves the presence of several key characteristics, among them a desire for purity and authenticity, the importance of a new kind of authority figure or text, and a new pattern for living that often breaks with mainstream culture.
Holy War: While religious traditions often advocate holy war, they also contain resources for thinking through the moral complexity of “just” warfare. While there’s no clear roadmap or set of conclusions, each tradition has within it an obligation to wrestle morally, conceptually, and strategically about when to wage war.
You’ll also explore sacred texts to see what they have to say about the spiritual purposes of violence, and how their meanings may have been misconstrued and manipulated over time. Some of the fascinating books you’ll explore include n...”