Book looks into varying social action
Special to The Observer
The capacity of religious belief to inspire both peaceful and violent social action among people of the same faith traditions is explored in a new book by Notre Dame historian R. Scott Appleby.
Published by Rowman & Littlefield, "The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation" was commissioned by the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict and emerged from a conference cosponsored by the commission and Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. The book's forward is by Father Theodore Hesburgh, former Notre Dame president and for more than a half century a leading figure in worldwide efforts to reconcile international conflicts peacefully.
Terrorists and peacemakers may grow up in the same community, but the killing carried out by one and the reconcilliation fostered by the other indicate the range of dramatic and contradictory responses of believers to suffering and injustice.
In the book, Appleby explores what religiously motivated terrorists and religiously inspired peacemakers share in common and what prompts them to radically opposite paths in fighting injustice. He also examines how a deeper understanding of religious extremism can and must be integrated more effectively into worldwide thinking about tribal, regional and international conflict.
"Scott Appleby's book provides a timely, clear and highly perceptive treatment of why and how religion has, especially since the end of the Cold War, gravitated to the center of the discussion of international affairs …" said David Little, professor of practice in religion, ethnicity and international conflict at Harvard Divinity School. "There is no doubt that this volume will be the centerpiece henceforward of an important new discussion on religion, violence and reconcilliation."
Appleby, a professor of history and director of Notre Dame's Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, is one of the world's leading authorities on religious fundamentalists.
All News Stories for Thursday, March 9, 2000
