The Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Cambridge University Press, 2/16/2009
EAN 9780521518857, ISBN10: 0521518857

Hardcover, 296 pages, 23.4 x 15.8 x 2.2 cm
Language: English

A peculiar and fascinating aspect of many responses to mass atrocities is the creative and eclectic use of religious language and frameworks. Some crimes are so extreme that they 'cry out to heaven', drawing people to employ religious vocabulary to make meaning of and to judge what happened, to deal with questions of guilt and responsibility, and to re-establish hope and trust in their lives. Moreover, in recent years, religious actors have become increasingly influential in worldwide contexts of conflict-resolution and transitional justice. This collection offers a critical assessment of the possibilities and problems pertaining to attempts to bring religious - or semi-religious - allegiances and perspectives to bear in responses to the mass atrocities of our time: When and how can religious language or religious beliefs and practices be either necessary or helpful? And what are the problems and reasons for caution or critique? In this book, a group of distinguished scholars explore these questions and offer a range of original explanatory and normative perspectives.

Part I. Between Necessity and Impossibility
The Role of Religion in the Face of Atrocity
1. Religious rhetoric in responses to atrocity Jennifer L. Geddes
2. The limit of ethics - the ethics of the limit Arne Grøn
3. The intolerability of meaning
myth, faith and reason in philosophical responses to moral atrocity Peter Dews
Part II. Does it Help to Import Religious Ideas? Reflections on Punishment, War and Forgiveness
4. Can we punish the perpetrators of atrocities? Antony Duff
5. On the advocacy of forgiveness after mass atrocities Thomas Brudholm
6. The ethics of forgiveness and the doctrine of just war
a religious view of righting atrocious wrongs Nigel Biggar
Part III. Sociologies of the Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocities
7. Making whole
the ethics and politics of 'coming to terms with the past' John Torpey
8. When faith meets history
the influence of religion on transitional justice Daniel Philpot
9. Genocidal rupture and performative repair in global civil society
reconsidering the discourse of apology in the face of mass atrocity Thomas Cushman
10. Violence, human rights and piety
cosmopolitanism versus virtuous exclusion Bryan Turner.