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Theorizing Modernities article

Is Christianity Bad for Women?


The short answer, according to Rachel Held Evans, Protestant author and columnist, Mary Rice Hasson, Catholic fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, and Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of NETWORK and spokesperson for the Nuns on the Bus movement, is no. But as all things, it’s complicated, and perspective is key.

At an occasionally heated and raucous event on September 22nd at the University of Notre Dame, the three Christian public intellectuals spoke from their personal experiences on the question of sex complementarity versus equality in a discussion incontrovertibly bound to the interpretation of tradition as embedded in or immutable to historical and material contexts.

The crux of the conversation was the ordination of women, which is forbidden by the Catholic Church as well as by some Protestant denominations. Should Christian men and women have access to the same leadership positions? Mary Hasson was alone in arguing that women should not be priests as the priest represents Jesus sacramentally and pastorally. “Why do women have to be clerics?” she asked. “Being a cleric is not the pinnacle—what we are called to is holiness.” That is not to say women’s leadership should not be cultivated; in fact, she argued that “many opportunities were missed before Pope Francis brought women into his leadership in the Synod”. “Our problem as a society is that we have not valued caring” and by extension, have not valued women’s roles.

These postures arose from opposing understandings of the source of the prohibition. Is the barring of women from the priesthood or pastorship a cultural artifact, held over from, as Sr. Campbell described, “a [Church] institution organized as a monarchy” but now existing in a “culture of democracy”? Hewing to the cultural argument, Held Evans warned that the “people who have power in the church are the people who have power in our societies,” lamenting institutional co-optation from an initial state where the “church was full of women and poor people”. Hasson recognized that the Church is flawed in the sense that it is run by humans, but argued that the institution is a God-given gift and thereby its structure (and attendant restrictions on women’s roles) remains unquestionable.

If men and women have divinely ordained roles, as Hasson argues, these roles are fixed and the argument regarding equality becomes about how symmetrically those roles are valued. Additionally, this also presupposes a biologically reductive approach to sexual identities, an approach long challenged by social scientific scholarship. In practice, traditional male and female roles have not been valued equally, and real danger lies, as Susan Okin warns, in women being barred from “participat[ing] in and influenc[ing] the more public parts of the cultural life, where rules and regulations about both public and private life are made” (Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women, 13). If only men are permitted to hold certain divinely ordained roles that hold greater power over determining cultural practices, then women are, effectively, less equal. My question for Hasson, then, is whether the roles available to women in the Church provide them equal cultural influence to men.

This debate is not unique to Christianity: as Margot Badran highlights in “Defining feminisms, upholding equality” on Contending Modernities’ blog, similar debates over whether complementarity effectively means subordination for women occur in Islam. While mainstream Islam focuses, for example, on the belief that Adam and Eve were created simultaneously from the same soul, Azizah Y. Al-Hibridi contends that “[Islamic] jurists have succeeded in developing a patriarchal interpretation of various Qur’anic passages” (Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women,  44). These two scholars argue subsequent, cultural, interpretations are at the root of an inequitable approach to the sexes. Meanwhile, Saba Mahmood questions the dominant feminist narrative that all individuals express their agency through liberation from traditional practices and ways of knowing. She notes in her article on the Egyptian Islamic Revival “that the desire for freedom and liberation is a historically situated desire… that needs to be reconsidered in light of other desires, aspirations, and capacities that inhere in a culturally and historically located subject” (223).

Campbell, Held, and Hasson have all sought and found leadership opportunities within their respective Catholic and Protestant churches. The fact that an event on whether “Christianity is bad for women” became an event about “why doesn’t the church offer women and men equal leadership roles” speaks to their personal grappling with the spaces they were and were not allowed to enter due to their sex. All found alternate ways to carry out their leadership, Held in a new church which permitted her to take the pulpit, Hasson in directing the Catholic Women’s Forum promoting women’s leadership as per Pope Francis’ call, and Campbell as “a minister of another sort” practicing law to serve “those who didn’t have anyone else”. In spite of “trouble with middle management”, as Campbell put it, all three argued that overall their experience with their Christian faith has been liberating, healing, and has imparted a deep sense of purpose.

In finding their strengths and vocations through their respective traditions, the three speakers present a clear challenge to an unreconstructed secularist presumption that views religion as an obstacle for female agency and flourishing. On the other hand, feminist engagements with (occasionally irreconcilable) sexism that undergirds certain religious texts and praxis also suggests that an embedded contestation draws upon ethical resources internal and external to the tradition, including the normativity underpinning human rights conventions. Campbell, for example, noted that her engagement with feminism, which is largely extratraditional, was critical in formulating a new perspective on gender roles in the Church.

For those not seeking leadership within their religious institutions, much was left out of the conversation. The control many church practices exert over female sexuality, emphasizing women’s physical vulnerability and often holding women liable for men’s attention through exhortations of modesty far above that required of men or by limiting the spaces women can traverse, was surprisingly unaddressed. The frequent exclusion of non-binary or alternate sexualities received only curtailed mention over whether accepting non-heterosexual sexual behavior effectively meant inappropriately “carving out” a new interpretation of tradition, harkening to the tradition as culturally embedded versus divinely mandated argument. The question of the inclusion of women and people who do not define their sexuality along heterosexual lines in Christian roles of power, equal to the roles occupied by cis men, if fraught, opens up the potential for these groups to promote practices that value the gifts, leadership, and dignity of all parishioners equally.

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Dania Straughan
Dania is Program Manager at the Contending Modernities research initiative, where she oversees operations and contributes to program development. Dania is a graduate of the Kroc Institute’s Masters in Peace Studies. She is active in efforts to establish restorative justice pathways in her local community, and volunteers to advance grant making for community-led social cohesion programs globally. She previously served as outreach coordinator at the Millennium Nucleus for the Study of Stateness and Democracy in Latin America, at the Catholic University of Chile.
Field Notes article

CRS: Lessons in Contemporary Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding


 

The case studies of Catholic Relief Services (CRS) projects profiled by Contending Modernities (CM) offer an encouraging snapshot of the role of religion in peacebuilding and conflict transformation processes. Although the projects also bear some room for specific revisions in their underlying design and modes of implementation–indeed, these shortcomings were often highlighted by CRS personnel involved with the projects –in several crucial respects, the practices evidenced by CRS’ programs represent the cutting edge of ways in which religious actors can concretely participate in change processes promoting social cohesion and reduction of violence in all its forms.

In particular, the CRS cases reflect a shift of focus in the subfield of religion, conflict, and peacebuilding away from what has long been the dominant approach: compartmentalizing religion as a distinct and isolated variable informing identity. Instead, all four of the CRS programs profiled by CM engage religion as one among many factors capable of both fomenting and resolving conflict. Most importantly, all of these programs recognize the capacity of religious actors–and especially those in positions of leadership–to operate across sectors toward goals that deepen social cohesion and reduce violent encounters. This proves especially valuable in the cases of conflicts like Bosnia and Herzegovina where “religion” (due to its conflation with ethnonational identities) appears as a “driver” of conflict and as an enduring obstacle for post-war reconciliation.

A nuanced approach to religion’s role in conflict helps to demythologize religion as a unique, disaggregated sociocultural phenomenon prone to driving violent conflict–thereby effectively troubling the very category of “religious conflict” itself. This is important in the post-war context of segregated social spaces and exclusive historical narratives, where religion is often reified as a divisive and determinant social marker. Rather, religion emerges in these case studies as one critical facet of intersectional social, cultural, and political identity-formation. As the CRS cases demonstrate, the most successful examples of contemporary inter-religious action within broader processes of peacebuilding and conflict transformation address religion as situated within broader, complex constellations of identity-formation (including socio-economic, racial, ethnic, national, political, postcolonial, and myriad other factors). Such an approach marks positive progress away from historical attempts to extrude religion from other, overlapping socio-cultural identity categories for its ostensible role as a unique conflict driver, and conversely, related attempts at instrumentalizing a similarly decontextualized construction of religion to serve as a silver bullet cure for intractable conflict with religious dimensions (especially through elite-level inter-religious dialogue (IRD), as will be discussed below).

To this end, the cases of the Choosing Peace Together (CPT) program in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and the TA’ALA program in Egypt both highlight the ways in which religious difference may be compounded, along with ethnic difference and other identity markers, into narratives of social and political exclusion and other-ing capable of spanning generations. CRS’ work in both BiH and Egypt calls particular attention to the potential concretization of these identity narratives through sustained isolation. In both cases, the hardening of oppositional identities was found to result in and from both a physical separation and a lack of constructive socio-cultural mechanisms for engagement between communities whose suspicions of the “other” became further reinforced through prolonged mutual segregation.

Informing most of the cases of peacebuilding featured by Contending Modernities is the 3Bs approach. The 3B method, comprised of Binding, Bonding, and Bridging activities, sets the stage for reconciliation by addressing personal barriers to peace, fostering communal understanding and voice, and generating pathways to constructively encounter the “other.”  This method pays heed to deeply-held divisive narratives kept alive in hearts and practice, and better equips communities to develop local, pragmatic, and mutually agreed-upon conflict resolution mechanisms. Critically, the 3B method recognizes the relevance of inter- and intra-religious dialogue to facilitating pathways for peacebuilding and development outcomes. The latter are often framed in terms of “connector projects” such as building wells, promoting intergroup public health initiatives, and reducing rates of gender-based abusive practices. Such bridging projects promote conceptions of the “public good” and deepen capacities for social cohesion in tense pluralistic contexts. Operating horizontally and vertically at the (inter)personal, communal, and municipal levels–as exemplified by the case of Mindanao–the 3B model seeks to garner support among key stakeholders while increasing resilience in the face of potential violence through the establishment of action-oriented relationships and semi-formal mechanisms for conflict diffusion and transformation. As Omer explains:

Binding activities focus on self-transformation, including trauma healing and dialoguing. Bonding activities seek to strengthen intra-group relations, operating with a theory of change that suggests that improved intra-group relational patterns will benefit inter-group action and dialogue and capacity to negotiate land disputes. Within this space, traditional and religious leaders (TRLs) are trained to act as peace facilitators. Bonding activities also involve TRLs leading group celebrations and land conflict mapping and analysis (hence intra-group activities). Bridging activities eventually cultivate inter-group trust, reinforced by activities such as interfaith celebrations, implementing community-based reconciliation projects, joint legal literacy trainings, and inter-group dialoguing.

As the explicit application of the Binding, Bonding, and Bridging (3B) approach illustrated in all four cases, a more situated, intersectional conceptualization of the category of religion and how it operates within a given context also opens the door for broadening peacebuilding approaches to engage new sociopolitical spheres. In particular, 3B outcomes in Mindanao and from the CRS’ Dialogue and Action Project (DAP) in the Coastal region of Kenya highlight the ways in which engagement with religious and community leaders can be instrumental to broader peacebuilding initiatives that are not necessarily “religious” in nature. Leveraging religious authority through inter-religious action (IRA) training can help resolve conflicts such as land disputes, or to promote well-being by reducing the incidence of child marriages. As inter-religious action and training helps to foster broader inter-group mobilization around these issues, the networks of actors may even extend their efforts into secular institutional spaces–such as public policy and local/national legal systems–that might have been considered potentially hostile to the “traditional” influence of religion. The opportunities for innovation and collaboration with secular law courts, governments, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations evidenced by the Mindanao and Kenya cases demonstrate the potential for establishing norms of constructive contestation of difference between communities and across boundaries of tradition. However, these case studies also point to the vital importance of local capacity-building in the generation and maintenance of these new norms, and the necessity of training and resources to help avoid escalation into destructive forms of conflict. The importance of developing of new patterns of constructive engagement and interaction goes beyond recasting social norms and narratives; behind these narratives often lie extensive histories of actual grievances rooted in social, cultural, and political structures of material disparity and exclusion that will almost inevitably require inter-group cooperation to dismantle.

Several of the cases also point to the ways in which IRA-focused peacebuilding moves beyond the more limited model of mobilizing and leveraging the authority of local religious and community leaders. While such leaders still featured prominently in the implementation of all of the CRS cases surveyed by CM, the cases of CPT, TA’ALA, and the DAP project also demonstrated the extension of CRS’ peacebuilding efforts to youth programming, thereby tapping into a demographic whose needs–and potential role as a future driver of conflict or peace–are often sidelined by the privileging of older, male authority figures. The shortcomings of the model focused on training and enhancing the peacebuilding capacity of religious leaders were also apparent in several cases, as this approach tends to exclude women as parties to conflict and potential actors in formal peacebuilding processes. Importantly, and regardless of their apparent invisibility from such processes, women play pivotal roles as change agents within religious communities and more broadly. The authors of the Mindanao report reflected directly on the challenges of including women in peacebuilding programs that relied heavily on established male authority and social capital, though they emphasized that such inclusion would ultimately be necessary to achieve more capacious notions of peace and development.

While these cases indicate the need for increased participation among women in the local design and implementation of peacebuilding, the TA’ALA case study also highlights other potential risks of limiting engagement to male authority figures as agents of identity-driven conflict. In particular, the TA’ALA case reported the surprising degree to which mothers–not religious or community leaders–were found to be responsible for fostering ethno-religious identity formation in local youth, often along exclusivist lines. Thus, further engagement with women and children in the conceptualization and implementation of future peacebuilding projects may ensure their scope is more inclusive, and that they better address unanticipated loci of authority driving oppositional identity formation within given local contexts.

Perhaps most fundamentally, across all four cases, the forms of prescribed inter-religious engagement also moved (either by design or voluntarily, as in the case of the collaborative community clean-up effort emerging from the TA’ALA project) beyond an emphasis on inter-religious dialogue to inter-religious action. This shift stands out as perhaps the most concrete signal that peacebuilding has begun to transition away from solely focusing on religious literacy and understanding between conflict parties (the corollary to the view that categorical religious difference and mutual ignorance drive conflict, and can be overcome through elite-level IRD), toward ensuring that such efforts are paired with praxiologically driven forms of action and broader inter-community engagement. This shift should not be taken as invalidating the importance of religious literacy and intra/inter-religious dialogue as such. In fact, the central role of traditional and religious leaders (TRLs) in the bonding and bridging stages of the 3B process–during which these leaders are trained as peace facilitators and lead intra and inter-religious events and activities–highlights the crucial part that more traditional forms of IRD play in the success of subsequent IRA engagement. Rather, the IRA approach highlighted by the 3B process indicates the frequent insufficiency of IRD alone as a means of achieving thorough-going, multi-level transformation in a given context. For this reason, as discussed above, the emphasis on improving inter-group patterns of relation through multi-level action and engagement in addition to IRD stands out as a hallmark of the 3B process. The specialized, local articulations of need and the corresponding peacebuilding strategies highlighted across the four featured case studies speak to the breadth of concerns and potential sites of conflict–including non-religious issues, such as land, child marriage, and development–opened by the shift in emphasis from IRD alone to the more expansive IRA approach.

The CRS cases profiled by CM demonstrate the ways in which recent advances in the theory of religion, conflict, and peacebuilding play out when applied across a diverse array of localized contexts. Cases such as CPT and TA’ALA in particular help to complexify previous notions of “religious conflict” that relied on the construction of religion as a disaggregated identity category and driver of conflict or as epiphenomenal to more basic material causes, and in so doing also point to the ways in which peacebuilding must approach religion as one among a potential host of intersecting identity markers whose particular contours and influence will vary within and across given conflicts. Similarly, the A3B project in Mindanao and the DAP project in Kenya show that engaging with religious and traditional leaders can also be an effective way to address issues, such as land use and child marriage, that may not be considered “religious” at all. The results of these case studies also highlight the transformational possibilities inherent in the shift from elite-level inter-religious dialogue toward increased emphasis on constructive, action-oriented engagement. Whether in local authority figures in Mindanao collaborating to broaden the scope of inter-religious conflict resolution or in youths from different religious backgrounds coming together to clean up a neighborhood in Luxor, the examples of IRA in these case studies represent a very positive step forward for contemporary theory and action around religion, conflict, and peacebuilding.

Featured photo courtesy of Catholic Relief Services/Philip Laubner.

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Garrett FitzGerald
Garrett FitzGerald is a Doctor of Political Science & Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame and was a Research Associate for Contending Modernities. Garrett’s research interests focus on bringing the critical and constructive insights of decolonial thought into conversation with the theory and practice of peacebuilding.
Theorizing Modernities article

Prophecy without Contempt: Symposium Introduction


Prophecy Without Contempt Book Symposium
“The American public square is not a seminar room” (419). So argues Cathleen Kaveny in her brilliant new book Prophecy without Contempt: Religious Discourse in the Public Square (Harvard University Press, 2016). Rather than conceptualizing the public sphere through its relationship to an “ideal speech situation,” as critical theorist Jürgen Habermas theorized, Kaveny hews close to the actual modes of exchange that populate political discourse. In doing so, Kaveny argues we need to give less attention to the dynamics of deliberation, and more to the rhetoric of prophetic indictment. In the following introduction to this Contending Modernities book symposium, I briefly present Kaveny’s book and situate the four responses from M. Christian Green, Gustavo Maya, Jason Springs, and Vincent Lloyd in relation to the ongoing analysis of Contending Modernities.

Kaveny’s argument for a greater attention to the rhetoric of prophetic speech is divided into four parts. In the first part she sets the stage for her argument by surveying three prominent accounts of the public sphere from Alasdair MacIntyre, John Rawls, and Stephen Carter. She has particular critiques for each account—MacIntyre cannot account adequately for the internal plurality of religious traditions, Rawls’s restriction of allowed reasons fails to meet his own criterion of civic respect, and Carter misunderstands the particularistic origins of the call for civility—yet each of these critiques are drafted into her wider argument that none of them pay sufficient heed to the rhetorical dimensions of public speech.

Remedying this lack, Kaveny’s second part performs a historical retrieval of the American jeremiad. Kaveny argues that the jeremiad initially served to call its hearers back to a common covenant, but came to be used divisively by later generations. For Kaveny, prophetic rhetoric is forensic: it identifies wrongdoing according to a commonly accepted standard. When this common standard comes into question, prophetic indictment cannot be properly deployed. Some readers will suspect a MacIntyrian declension narrative at work here: while the jeremiad operated rightly within the cohesive early Puritan communities, it fails as it is deployed within more complex and less homogenous socio-political contexts. Yet, Kaveny is less concerned with a return to origins than the possibility of prophetic speech within a pluralistic public square.

The third and fourth parts, then, take up this challenge. In the third part, Kaveny executes a rhetorical analysis of the relationship between deliberation and indictment through a detailed exposition of debates regarding abortion and torture in the 2004 American presidential campaign. This careful empirical work sets up the final part, in which Kaveny offers a constructive ethic of prophetic rhetoric. Conceptualizing prophecy as a form of verbal “chemotherapy,” Kaveny argues that it should be used with great judiciousness. Like an oncologist knows: too little will kill the patient by lack of treatment, too much will kill the patient by fatal toxicity. Thus, prophetic indictment should be used with care as a necessary part of our public engagement.

Kaveny has done a great service for those of us interested in understanding the dynamics of political, moral and religious contention at work in late modernity. She advances the scholarly conversation in a number of ways that are pertinent for Contending Modernities, which is no surprise given her important role in the early stages of the project. This symposium aims to emphasize several of those advances and invite further examination.

M. Christian Green’s essay wonders about the role of lament in prophetic discourse. Particularly in a time where religious actors worry (rightly or wrongly) about a purported displacement of religious speech, Green argues that the dynamics of lament, an important element of the Hebraic sources of prophetic speech, deserve further attention. Gustavo Maya and Jason Springs both ask Kaveny to further clarify the relationship between prophetic indictment and moral deliberation. Maya asks whether the call to return to a common covenant, basic to Kaveny’s historical retrieval, is viable in our pluralistic present. We might ask, additionally, whether pluralism itself can operate as a substantive value, and if so what prophetic speech might look like in such a context. Springs, meanwhile, pushes Kaveny to consider the reasons of prophecy, drawing upon Abraham Joshua Heschel to argue that prophecy need not be reduced to indictment alone, but entails both a range of activities and the practical wisdom to know when to deploy each. Finally, Vincent Lloyd takes Kaveny’s turn to the actual experience of the public square and intensifies it by reflecting on our common experience of watching public rhetoric. Lloyd thus invites Kaveny to consider what it might look like for scholars to consider the much more common and mundane act of watching as a fundamental activity of the public square.

Together, these essays celebrate the power of Kaveny’s work by taking her challenge to attend to the actual contours of religious and secular discourse in the public square, all with a normative aim. Kaveny’s book resets the terms of debate, focusing our attention on the moral dynamics of public rhetoric. Kaveny sets a new standard for treatment of the public square, one that deserves sustained scholarly and popular engagement.

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Kyle Lambelet
Kyle Lambelet, PhD is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University's Candler School of Theology and a Research Associate with Contending Modernities. His research focuses on the intersections of religion, ethics, conflict, and peace with particular attention to the ethics of nonviolence.
Field Notes article

Promoting Interreligious Tolerance in Upper Egypt


TA’ALA (Tolerant Attitudes and Leadership for Action) was a two year (2013-2015) CRS project, in partnership with the local Coptic Catholic Dioceses and three Muslim or interfaith organizations: Nour El Islam, Family House, and Sohag CDA. It was implemented in twenty villages in the three Upper Egyptian governorates of Assiut, Sohag, and Luxor. In a context where Christian-Muslim violence often erupts, manifesting occasionally in the destruction of Christian places of worship, TA’ALA was designed to enhance interreligious tolerance as a pathway to nonviolent inter-group conflict mediation. As in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s obstacles for post-war reconciliation, escalating patterns of violence along religiocultural fault-lines in Upper Egypt can be explained in terms of societal separation, which contributes to stereotyping, discrimination, and other-ing. Roger Fahmy, who oversaw TA’ALA and wrote the CRS case study along with Malaka Refai, explains that Christian communities in Upper Egypt rely on the institutional infrastructures of the Church to structure all sociocultural aspects of their lives, not just those restricted to educational and worship functions. Conflict management, therefore, has been intra-group focused, with few resources for inter-group conflict transformation, including a lack of shared space for congregating. Inter-group conflict escalates quickly to violence precisely because of the lack of leadership willing to deescalate (in fact, some religious entrepreneurs occasionally have an interest in escalating violence) and the absence of sociocultural mechanisms for conflict transformation. Hence, TA’ALA focuses on programing opportunities for leaders and youth to cultivate relations with one another as pivotal for expanding interreligious tolerance in various societal sectors.

The theory of change informing TA’ALA emphasized Muslim and Christian leaders and their willingness to be agents of collaborative conflict resolution and promoters of tolerance, and stressed how such collaborative action could contribute to overall reduction of inter-group suspicion along religiocultural lines. As in the case of CRS’ work in Central Mindanao, the project hinged on leaders’ potential ability to deescalate and/or prevent violent outcomes in situations of inter-group conflict. Selection of participants for leadership training, therefore, was determined by an assessment of leaders’ relative respectability and perceived authority within their respective communities. Those selected took part in binding (self-transformational) and bonding (intra-group dialogue and reassessment) activities, enhancing their peacebuilding capacities. Youth also engaged in similar training and in inter-group cultural activities. A final assessment of project implementation, however, determined that too much time was devoted to training and that a more effective approach would have privileged action-centric programing.

According to Fahmy, the Muslim and Christian religious and clan leaders who participated in TA’ALA established mechanisms to monitor and resolve interreligious conflict. There were 38 self-reported and corroborated instances of successful intercommunal interventions in interreligious, domestic, and intrareligious conflicts. Likewise, to support the goal of promoting interreligious tolerance, religious and clan leaders created 41 statements on the importance of cultivating inter-group acceptance, which were then shared with their communities. Other outcomes included 26 youth community action initiatives, such as health awareness campaigns, mixed faith sports events, and exchange visits to religious sites. Relationship-building through inter-group retreats also proved pivotal as a unique opportunity to overcome a landscape of societal separation that prevents opportunities for cohabiting spaces. As a result of such relationship-building, villagers in Luxor and Sohag turned their homes into spaces for interactions with participants in TA’ALA. As occurred in Mindanao, TA’ALA projects and inter-group associations generated new forms of partnership for promoting development goals, such as a collaborative clean-up project in a local Luxor neighborhood. It also facilitated emergency interventions in the aftermath of violence. On the other hand, an assessment of TA’ALA determined that more attention needed to be directed to how mothers, in particular, contribute to belligerent attitudes toward other communities. This particular gender angle illumines the complex ways in which negative attitudes are transmitted inter-generationally and, once again, suggests important intersections with development objectives such as religious literacy, education, and women’s empowerment. Identifying mothers as agents of violence underscores the need to expand and de-center the conceptions of leadership and influence considered key for TA’ALA’s theory of change.

The case study of TA’ALA’s work in Upper Egypt demonstrates how tensions and violence between Muslim and Christian communities result from segregated spaces, misinformation and misperceptions reinforced through societal separation, and a lack of inter-communal mechanisms to resolve conflicts, both when they erupt and as they are fueled by various entrepreneurs (especially those more attuned to broader national discourses). The examination also shows that inter-group relationship building, compounded with intra-group and personal transformative work that challenges misperceptions and the demonizing of the “other,” can have significant effects on quality of life by establishing mechanisms for collaboration and for deescalating disputes. The focus on youth and influential religious and clan leaders once again points to the instrumental value of key religious actors, but also suggests that tangible results of interreligious dialogue can only be measured in terms of either preventative action or other collaborative campaigns and projects designed to advance expansive development “secular” goals, such as health and education. An analysis of “religion” in this context, as in the other CRS projects on interreligious action covered in the CM Blog, underscores once more that religion intersects strongly with other identities. Hence, beyond conducting exclusively “religious” interventions, overcoming rigid and belligerent boundaries and promoting reconciliation or de-escalation of violence requires attending to the transmission mechanisms of belligerence, stereotyping, and negative rhetoric. This also involves identifying key actors that, often with some cultivation of skills and self-transformative work, could influence intra-communal bonding in order to facilitate inter-communal bridging activities—all potentially contributing to increased social cohesion and democratic praxis. Critically, the focus on interreligious action identifies important figures but the latter’s effective instrumentality becomes the outcome of cultivating “secular” skills and competencies through enhanced cross-sectoral collaboration.

 

Photo by Nikki Gamer/CRS. Religious leaders Father Rueiss, left, and Sheikh Moustafa who met in TA’ALA program and continue to engage in interreligious action in the village of Al Odayssat, Luxor in Upper Egypt.

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Atalia Omer
 Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Politics (2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on Israel/Palestine; religion, violence, and peacebuilding; as well as theories and methods in the study of religion. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, resulting in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019). She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015). 
Field Notes article

United for Girls’ Rights: A Reflection


 

The Karima Primary School has installed anonymous boxes for reporting child abuse cases which are followed-up using an established government reporting protocol. The boxes were installed as part of the first phase of the CRS Dialogue and Action Project which advocates for children rights among school peers, teachers, parents and the wider school neighborhood community.

Of all the CRS case studies reviewed by Contending Modernities, the case study by Grace Ndugu of the CRS’ Dialogue and Action Project (DAP) in the Coastal region of Kenya offers the clearest examples of the intersections between interreligious action and an expansive development approach. In particular, the case highlights the relevance of inter- and intrareligious interventions (or rather, interventions by key religious actors) to resist gender–based violence, female illiteracy and vulnerability to sexual exploitation, trafficking, and child marriage, while also recognizing that girls and women are not the only targets of such human rights violations and persistent conditions of insecurity.

According to Kenya’s Demographic and Health Survey of 2014[1], 22.9% of women aged 20-24  were married before the age of 18, and 4.4% before the age of 15. In addition, only 21.6% of women and girls aged 15-49 have completed primary school, and only 14.2% have completed secondary school; while 24.3% have never received formal education at all. Hence, important correlations can be established between levels of literacy and education and child marriages and other related practices. Likewise, a 2013 CRS Stakeholders Workshop clarified that the commercialization of marriage through the “dowry” functions as a poverty coping mechanism, further exposing crucial interrelations between child marriages and other gender-based discrimination and exploitation on the one hand and poverty on the other. Furthermore, a 2006 survey[2] conducted by UNICEF and the Kenyan Government on sex tourism and exploitation of children in the Coastal region demonstrated that the effects of the interrelation between poverty, illiteracy and low levels of education, and gendered norms were compounded by the weak enforcement and communal ignorance of laws and policies related to child-protection. DAP focused on the Coastal region of Kenya because of its high incidence of child rights violations, including child marriage.

With this underlying analysis, CRS’s DAP (implemented from 2013-2016) involved accompanying the Coast Interfaith Council of Clerics (CICC) and the Catholic Diocese of Malindi (CDoM) in an effort to develop culturally-sensitive mechanisms and pathways for reducing the frequency of child marriage among vulnerable communities in the Coastal region. DAP’s interreligious and multi-sectoral approach was designed to engage a variety of key stakeholders including child protection government offices, interreligious leaders, and schools. The program engaged a total of 60 clerics and traditional elders from the Muslim, Christian (Catholics, mainstream Protestants under the umbrella of the National Council of Churches of Kenya, Evangelical Association of Kenya, and the Organization of Africa-Instituted churches), Hindu (Council of Kenya), and traditionalist religions (Kaya traditionalists). These leaders, all members of the CICC, coordinated through DAP to act against the prevalent practice of child marriage and to mobilize other community stakeholders toward the same end.

CRS Wema PEFA SILC Group in Watamu. The SILC group has an inter-religious composition and they start their meetings with inter-faith prayers and religious discussions that encourage inter-faith dialogue and social cohesion. All CRS DAP(Dialogue and Protection) SILC groups dedicate time for sensitization of child protection, especially from child marriage, sexual exploitation, early pregnancies and school drop outs. All SILC groups’ utilize percentages of their savings and loans towards school fees especially for the vulnerable girls who face societal marginalization due to patriarchal systems that favor boys to girls.
CRS Wema PEFA SILC Group in Watamu.
The SILC group has an inter-religious composition and they start their meetings with inter-faith prayers and religious discussions that encourage inter-faith dialogue and social cohesion. All CRS DAP(Dialogue and Protection) SILC groups dedicate time for sensitization of child protection, especially from child marriage, sexual exploitation, early pregnancies and school drop outs. All SILC groups’ utilize percentages of their savings and loans towards school fees especially for girls.

Recognizing the aforementioned correlations between poverty and child marriage, DAP focused on addressing poverty by operating 52 interreligious Saving and Lending Communities (SILC) groups, which included conversations on child rights in their weekly forums, as well as directing savings and loans toward retention of girls in school. DAP sought to cultivate child-driven child rights advocacy with 529 children in five primary schools’ peace clubs. Each peace club included Muslim and Christian “chaplains,” underscoring the interreligious dimensions of this program and the desire to implant a culture of peace and religious tolerance. DAP’s theory of change targets multiple mechanisms to address child marriage. Firstly, it argues that if children are equipped with the knowledge, skills, and support to advocate for their own rights against child marriage, they will be more empowered to do so. Secondly, if religious and traditional leaders strategize and coordinate ways of engaging parents and community members around traditional and religious teachings and values that support protection of children, DAP argues that families will recur to child marriage less often. Lastly, if governmental and legal mechanisms are better coordinated to enforce the legal protections of children, then child marriage in the target region will be reduced. The emphasis on engaging religious teachings and traditional praxis reflects DAP’s value-based, intra- and inter-faith approach to child rights combined with its other focus on child-driven advocacy through peace clubs and the SILC groups. The 60 CICC members were trained by the government and the DAP team in child abuse reporting protocol, confidentiality, child rights paralegal action, lobbying and advocacy skills, the use of anonymous boxes installed in schools, and the creation of a child helpline. The latter enabled 46 cases to be reported by children.

One unintended outcome of the implementation of DAP’s interreligious approach to child protection was an increase in CICC’s membership and regular monthly interactions in Lamu, the Tana Delta, and Malindi. These increased interactions could enhance social cohesion and religious tolerance, and reflect a move toward deepening interreligious capacity. However, as Ndugu reflects in her report, not all clerics and elders who participated in DAP contributed in the same way. In particular, those who joined later were not always resilient to exclusivist forces that perceived them as “traitors” or “spies” for interacting with the “other”—all labels relevant to the Kenyan landscape of mistrust and suspicion in the wake of terrorism. Hence, the program needed a clearer focus on strengthening intra- and inter-religious capacity.

Coast Inter-faith Clerics (CICC) Sixty inter-faith clerics met on July, 14th, 2015 for a workshop that confronted child abuse and championed child protection activities in Malindi. The CICC is comprised of 8 membership organizations namely; Catholic, Council of Imams and Preachers of Kenya (CIPK), Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims (SUPKEM), Evangelical Alliances of Kenya (EAK), National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK), Hindu Council of Kenya, African Traditional Religions (ATR) and Organization of African Instituted Churches (OAIC). The clerics initiate and promote peer discussions on child rights protection e.g. men to men and women to women in their places of worship. The African traditional leaders were purposely incorporated so as to provide insights on the cultural and traditional practices and also to champion the cause of child protection from any detrimental practices amongst the Giriama communities.
Coast Inter-faith Clerics (CICC)
Sixty inter-faith clerics met on July, 14th, 2015 for a workshop that confronted child abuse and championed child protection activities in Malindi.

Nonetheless, the case study demonstrates an instance where the instrumentality of religious leaders and traditional elders is not only assessed in terms of their relative credibility and traction within their respective community. In the case of DAP, the effectiveness of these leaders and elders is also intimately related to their ability to speak authoritatively within their traditions, employing appropriate resources and interpretive lenses, in order to counter the prevailing praxis of child marriage and related abuses. The value-based approach, wherein interreligious action meant strategically coordinating value-based engagement of religious leaders and elders with various stakeholders across a variety of communities in order to reduce child marriage, also involved training these leaders to navigate legal and other official mechanisms for child advocacy and protection. Hence, these (male) leaders’ ability to leverage their social and cultural location for promoting child protection was reinforced through expanding their skills and scope of activism.

DAP’s effectiveness, however, depends not only on interreligious action around the legal protection of children. It depends, additionally, on a coordinated cross-sectoral effort where interreligious cooperation and religio-cultural intervention is but one facet of a broader campaign, involving governmental agencies, legal mechanisms, and children’s own empowerment through knowledge of their rights. In the final analysis, this case of interreligious action brings to the fore the relevance of inter- and intra-religious action and dialogue in mobilizing and enabling, in a culturally-sensitive manner, changes to practices deemed “traditional” and thus authoritative. The case also deeply conveys the intersections between under-development, insecurity, and exploitation of vulnerable populations.

[1] Republic of Kenya, Demographic and Health Survey 2014, (December 2015). https://dhsprogram.com/pubs/pdf/FR308/FR308.pdf

[2] UNICEF and Republic of Kenya, The Extent and Effect of Sex Tourism and Sexual Exploitation of Children on the Kenyan Coast, Pre-Publication Edition. (December 2016). http://lastradainternational.org/lsidocs/418%20extent_n_efect_1007.pdf

 

Photo credit: Philip Laubner/CRS

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Atalia Omer
 Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Politics (2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on Israel/Palestine; religion, violence, and peacebuilding; as well as theories and methods in the study of religion. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, resulting in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019). She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015). 
Theorizing Modernities article

Authorizing the Human Person in a Cosmopolitan Age: A Thematic Synthesis


 

How do religious and secular traditions approach and contest bioethical questions of human dignity and integrity? Do they operate with different conceptions of the “person”? How can communities coexist peacefully in the wake of unprecedented migrations or in the ashes of intercommunal violence? How do individuals negotiate questions of identity, and sources of authority, in locations as diverse as Indonesia, the Ivory Coast, and Nigeria?

The Contending Modernities (CM) initiative has engaged all of these questions through its Science and the Human Person, Global Migrations and the New Cosmopolitanism, and Authority, Community, and Identity Indonesia and Sub-Saharan Africa Working Groups. In a plenary conference which drew to a close the first phase of CM research efforts, held in Rome, Italy, in June of 2015, the four CM research groups gathered to present their findings and reflect on the intersections of their work on the multiple constructions of “modernity”. We weave together the major themes of this conference in a synthetic account that brings to bear relevant scholarship and looks both back at CM’s research trajectory, as well as forward to the future research and outreach agenda of the CM initiative.

We invite you to read “Authorizing the Human Person in a Cosmopolitan Age: Science, Society, and Identity”, and join us in celebrating the first phase of the Contending Modernities project.

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Atalia Omer
 Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Politics (2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on Israel/Palestine; religion, violence, and peacebuilding; as well as theories and methods in the study of religion. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, resulting in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019). She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015). 
Global Currents article

Intersecting Fears of Islamophobia and Homophobia: A Call For Proposals


Fear is a potent political motivator. Though the fear of others has long been used as a technology of power, the intersecting phobias of religious and secular others has a peculiar dynamic in late modernity. Communication technologies accelerate our inter-connectedness making otherness more apparent, and thus more normalized, as well as rendering fear of the other more actionable as a political tool. In cases across the globe, from Orlando to Lahore, the interstices of sexuality and religion have proven particularly fraught, even deadly. A facile opposition of Western tolerance with Islamic prejudice distorts the complex and contending dynamics of identity, gender, authority, desire, religion, secularism, power, sex, and violence. The dynamics of Islamophobia and homophobia have their own respective genealogies. Yet, when fused in our current historical moment they surface a common nexus of concerns related to secular governmentality, religious embodiment, and sexual purity and pleasure.

Contending Modernities seeks proposals for articles and symposia that develop our public, political and academic understanding of these dynamics by, first, outing the reified caricatures that function within islamo- and homo-phobias and, second, noting alternative, sub-altern constructions of hybrid identities. We seek proposals that balance an attention to historical specificity by disaggregating the unique ways that the dynamics of fear operate in particular cases while also theorizing these intersections generally, offering heuristic clarity to complex dynamics by looking comparatively across religious traditions, historical periods, or geographical cases.

We solicit articles and symposia that might analyze, but are not limited to:

  • Historical cases of transgressive genders and sexualities within Islam;
  • The racialization of Islamic identities and the complicity of racism with desires for sexual purity;
  • Quranic texts which have been used to construct (or deconstruct) normative categories of gender identity and the hermeneutic possibilities and limits of those texts;
  • Contemporary events such as the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, the Pakistani Fatwa regarding transgender marriage, or others;
  • Emic perspectives on the inclusion or exclusion of religious and/or sexual others within Islamic and/or LGBTQ communities;
  • Similarities and differences regarding sexuality and religion in Catholicism or Evangelical Christianity (or other religious and secular traditions);
  • Post-colonial critiques of the impact of international norms and organizations on the spread of normative sexualities;
  • The dynamics of fashion, from the Burkini controversy to Turkish Muslimism;
  • Legal and extra-legal mechanisms that police aberrant sexualities;

Contending Modernities editors will eagerly receive proposals for symposia of three to four commentators, scholars, and activists on a specific issue, event, or theme. Symposia authors will ideally be a mix of senior scholars, graduate students, and public intellectuals. We will also allow single-author submissions, though we will give preference to conversations and encourage single-author submissions to respond to material already published on Contending Modernities.

To submit a symposium proposal please send a document that lists the topic you plan to treat, a 300 word abstract for the symposium as a whole, the names of proposed authors, and titles for the topics of each author’s contribution. Contributions should be around 750 words in length.

Proposals were accepted on a rolling basis through the fall of 2016.

 

Photo Credit: Tever McFervienza, “Alambre de Espino”

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Kyle Lambelet
Kyle Lambelet, PhD is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University's Candler School of Theology and a Research Associate with Contending Modernities. His research focuses on the intersections of religion, ethics, conflict, and peace with particular attention to the ethics of nonviolence.
Theorizing Modernities article

Inter-Religious Action in Central Mindanao: Applying Binding, Bonding, and Bridging to Land Conflict


In Mindanao, the southernmost island region of the Philippines, armed groups have struggled against the central government since at least the time of Spanish colonial rule. Setbacks have marred the implementation of a 2014 peace agreement with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, such as the failure by the Filipino Congress to pass a key provision regarding governance of the current autonomous region in February 2016. Such complications have heightened fears of renewed violence and continued conflict. Catholic Relief Services directly addresses a key root cause of the ongoing violence through its Applying Binding, Bonding, and Bridging to Land Conflict (A3B).

CRS Program Manager of the Peace and Reconciliation Program Myla Leguro describes land disputes among Muslims, Christians, and indigenous groups as a primary driver of conflict and violence in Mindanao. A history of Christian settler colonialism and systematic land grabs through bureaucratic and legal mechanisms are significant contributing factors to intercommunal tensions and the insurgency of Moro Muslims against the government of the Philippines. Nonetheless, the conflict in Mindanao is frequently described as religiously-motivated, underscoring the dangers of reductive culturalist explanatory frameworks of the relations between religion and violence. Such frameworks ignore the relevance of a deep historical analysis of, in this case, patterns of colonial exploitation associated with Christians.

Colonialization manifests itself through a variety of forms, and one such form is its legal and bureaucratic logic. The colonial infrastructure’s legacy of privileging Christian settlers and a commercial (now neoliberal) agenda over and against Muslims and other indigenous communities undergird contemporary land disputes at the epicenter of the broader conflict in Mindanao. Leguro reads such disputes as loci of “collision” between competing modern property law and traditional conceptions of land ownership. Escalating land disputes over the past three decades, she adds, have deepened fear and prejudice among communities and have contributed to social disintegration and violence. Further, outcomes of judicial mechanisms can themselves turn into drivers of conflict because such mechanisms tend to determine winners and losers and refrain from a more communal restorative approach to justice that takes into account multiple stakeholders. Hence, CRS enters as a tradition-grounded organization that sees its involvement in inter-religious action in terms of active accompaniment through strong partnerships with local actors and NGOs.

Before turning to the analysis of the A3B program, which was implemented in Mindanao in an effort to reduce land dispute related violence, one needs to dwell on a few themes that arise from an examination of the historical foundations of Muslim-Christian hostility and (small and large-scale) violence. Modern Filipino history is marked by the experience of colonialism and its technologies of domination. Around the world modernity, as enshrined in colonial administrations and legal mechanisms and codes (for example, property rights), has been a source of conflict and structural and cultural violence—including ethnic cleansing, the displacement of populations through bureaucratic maneuvering or actual force.

In Mindanao, Spanish and U.S. colonial administrations invited predominantly Christian settlers from crowded Luzon and Visayas islands and provided them with land titles, disadvantaging indigenous Muslims and non-Christians who were gradually stripped of traditionally-held communal lands and political systems.[1] Hence, land and property rights are not merely “legal” issues but also communal issues laden with sociocultural meanings and drawn along ethnoreligious lines. This case raises a variety of questions including whether the role of traditional (religious) authorities is oppositional to a legal-bureaucratic rationale. How can one conceptualize the relations and tensions between seemingly competing sources of authority? How can historical memories of displacement through colonial modernization be redressed and what might be the roles of inter- and intra-religious work in such processes? In the case of Mindanao, the dynamics of violence spanning over decades enhanced intra- and inter-group religioethnic tensions. Thus, religioethnic constructive engagements constitute necessary (albeit not sufficient) mechanisms for building inclusive societal relations and reducing violence.

Land Claim Discussion with A3B Staff: Photo Courtesy of Pamaas

Land Claim Discussion with A3B Staff: Photo Courtesy of Pamaas

The A3B project, or the three-step approach for reconciliation through Binding, Bonding, and Bridging activities, cultivates alternatives to violence on (inter)personal, communal, and municipal levels, Leguro explains. Binding activities focus on self-transformation, including trauma healing and dialoguing. Bonding activities seek to strengthen intra-group relations, operating with a theory of change that suggests that improved intra-group relational patterns will benefit inter-group action and dialogue and capacity to negotiate land disputes. Within this space, traditional and religious leaders (TRLs) are trained to act as peace facilitators. Bonding activities also involve TRLs leading group celebrations and land conflict mapping and analysis (hence intra-group activities). Bridging activities eventually cultivate inter-group trust, reinforced by activities such as interfaith celebrations, implementing community-based reconciliation projects, joint legal literacy trainings, and inter-group dialoguing. The cumulative desired outcome of A3B is a set of pragmatic and implementable mutually agreed-upon negotiated resolutions that can garner support from stakeholders at the local, municipal, and regional government levels. Indeed, the accomplishments of A3B, implemented in the course of 3 years from 2012 to 2015 by CRS and local partners in 20 districts (barangays) in 4 municipalities in Central Mindanao, are impressive. These accomplishments include the resolution of 35 land conflict cases by TRLs working alongside Lupong Tagapamayapa (LTs or village pacification committees), the mobilization of 143 TRLs as community peace facilitators involved in the formation of 4 municipal interfaith networks, the completion of 379 binding and bonding activities involving 5,991 individuals, the completion of 18 community-based reconciliation projects, training of 293 LTs from 20 barangays in peacebuilding and conflict mediation, and the establishment by CRS’ partner organizations of four municipal inter-agency working groups facilitating connections between horizontal community-based work and vertical policy support. This suggests a strong potential relationship between community-based 3B activities and strengthening of governance and cultivation of democratic values and practices.

The many outcomes of the A3B project in Central Mindanao reveal the complex ways in which community, identity, and authority play out in post-colonial conflict zones. They also highlight the ways in which religion and religious actors can participate in binding, bonding, and bridging activities that contend with and innovate within the otherwise colluding forces of judicial mechanisms (with their colonial baggage) and the experiences of communal disruption and divisions along ethnoreligious fault lines. Indeed, in Mindanao inter-identity or bridging activities (including the formation of the interfaith networks) among Christians, Muslims, and other indigenous people focus on mediating land disputes, a secular conflict at the intersection of modern legal constructs of property rights, histories of targeted colonial displacement, and long-term deepening of post-colonial inter-group hostilities, stereotyping, and othering.

Because traditional modalities of authority were deeply disrupted in the colonial era, the A3B focused on training and mobilizing local TRLs and LTs as agents of peacebuilding and land dispute mediation. Religious actors, therefore, are featured here as pivotal agents in conflict transformation from below, bearing synergistic relations with policy and governmental decision making levels. However, their centrality does not bear so much on theological and hermeneutical work but rather on bolstering their traction within and beyond their communities and enhancing their conflict resolution skills.

Augmenting the authority of TRLs and LTs, not surprisingly, also carried some spillover effects. According to Leguro, TRLs and LTs began to apply conflict resolution skills to non-land related conflicts. During the course of the A3B program, 3B was applied to family disputes and other types of conflicts. Likewise, community-based reconciliation projects influenced collaboration over other local development initiatives designed specifically to benefit women and children. Improving health facilities and services and installing water systems in barangays, for instance, increase women’s ability to partake in communal activities because they do not have to spend as much time fetching water. The interconnections between 3B’s emphasis on TRLs and LTs and the development agenda highlight religion’s mainstreaming in conflict analysis and sustainable peacebuilding processes. Enhancing traditional authorities and local patterns of reconciliation as well as facilitating various bridging activities to challenge other-ing and reinforce governance capacities contribute to and reinforce development foci on women’s empowerment.

Closing Ritual: Photo courtesy of OMI-IP Ministry

Closing Ritual: Photo courtesy of OMI-IP Ministry

Some gendered aspects of the A3B project were cause for concern, however. Notably, the focus on TRLs and LTs already presupposes and builds upon men’s authority within their local communities, as their credibility and influence are necessary starting points for boosting their capacities through training and 3B activities to function as “connectors” in inter-group efforts to mediate land conflicts. Yet the fact that all TRLs and LTs are male complicates the aspiration to establish mechanisms for more inclusion of women in 3B activities and other public roles and even positions of authority—all of which are crucial building blocks for cultivating inclusive societies and advancing an expansive view of development. Due to lessons from this project, CRS has expanded its understanding of “community leaders” to intentionally include women in 3B activities and affect highly male-dominated conflict resolution structures. Future 3b processes may also directly engage topics of gender identity in addition to religious and cultural identity.

A3B, therefore, raises questions concerning how the strengthening of religious male authorities furnishes resources for moving beyond a collision course of land disputes through intra- and inter-communal relationship-building. However, while potentially offering an avenue for constructive engagement over land issues, an approach that relies upon enhanced male-dominated religious authority–despite some positive spillover effects to the domain of development work, with its focus on greater quality of life for women and girls–reinforces gender inequality and the perpetuation of patriarchal sociocultural patterns. Future iterations may better realize a vision of women, youth, and children as actors of change in and of themselves. Nonetheless, the example of interreligious action in Mindanao illumines the complex ways in which religious and communal leaders can transform into agents of peacebuilding and social cohesion.

[1] Vellema, Sietze, and Francisco Lara Jr. “The Agrarian Roots of Contemporary Violent Conflict in Mindanao, Southern Philippines.” Journal of Agrarian Change 11, no. 3 (2011): 298-320.

Featured photo courtesy of Catholic Relief Services and CRS A3B Project Team.

 

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Atalia Omer
 Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Politics (2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on Israel/Palestine; religion, violence, and peacebuilding; as well as theories and methods in the study of religion. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, resulting in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019). She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015). 
Theorizing Modernities article

Response to Interlocutors


The greatest intellectual gift anyone can pay an author is to read and engage her written work—especially when it is as long and multi-faceted as Prophecy without Contempt! I am tremendously grateful, therefore, to Kyle Lambelet and Contending Modernities for assembling a panel of such learned and careful readers and perceptive critics to engage my book. In this short response, of course, I cannot hope to do justice to all of their insights, but only to highlight a few themes and attempt to carry the conversation forward. I am deeply grateful for their remarks, and I hope to continue the discussion more fully in many other contexts and venues.

Lambelet gets my general aim exactly right when he says that I “hew close to the actual modes of exchange that populate political discourse.” Vincent Lloyd talks about the importance of watching political discussions and debates. It is precisely because I saw so much prophetic indictment in the American public square, particularly around the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections, that I thought it important to come to grips with its nature, function, and pedigree in the nation’s political discourse. I also thought it crucial to map the relationship of prophetic indictment to reasoned deliberation. It is not, of course, that I do not value reasoned deliberation in itself. I do, however, think the discussion of religious and moral discourse in the public square needs to expand its consideration to include other forms of rhetorical interventions.

At a basic level, then, I suppose I am calling for the reintegration of the study of rhetoric with the study of public philosophy and theology. The purpose of interventions in the public square, after all, is to persuade others to think and act in a certain way. Reason-giving is only one tool of persuasion. And, of course, my own study of the rhetoric of prophetic indictment is just an additional piece of the puzzle. For example, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have been enormously influential figures in American public discourse—including discourse about the social role of religion. To understand what is happening in the American public square, therefore, we also need to scrutinize the use of humor, irony, and mockery, as well as the deployment of praise and blame. Then will we have a more adequate picture of our real speech situation, rather than a Habermasian ideal speech situation.

M. Christian Green’s observations on the importance of public lamentation are extremely helpful in expanding our focus from ideal public speech to real public speech. As she rightly notes, lamentation and prophetic discourse go hand in hand. The fiery condemnations of the Book of Jeremiah are followed by the prophet’s heart-rending laments for the losses of his people in the Book of Lamentations. And indeed, in order to be helpful rather than harmful to the larger community, prophetic indictment in the public square ought to be accompanied by lament for the sins that it condemns, rather than smug gloating at the destruction caused by those sins. But Green’s argument invites us to interpret our political conversation partners (both national and international) charitably. She points out how a sense of loss and fear may be motivating even the most adamant interventions in the public square (for example, advocates of traditional Christian sexual morality worry about being shunned and stigmatized). She also, in my view, presses us to move from lament to ritual: Colonial Americans ritualized their sorrows and fears through communal days of fasting and repentance. Is there any way for contemporary Americans to forge appropriate rituals for sorrow and grief that can bind us together rather than tear us apart? Moreover, Green’s essay for Contending Modernities presses us to broaden the question: can common rituals be forged that increase common understanding across religious and political boundaries? This strikes me as an exciting and under-explored possibility.

Gustavo Maya and Jason Springs helpfully encourage me to clarify and refine my analysis of the relationship between prophetic indictment and practical deliberation. I certainly agree that responsible prophetic indictment presupposes (as Springs notes) “socio-critical analysis, observational criticism, moral judgment, and deliberative accountability.” It is the sound use of these elements that helps distinguish true from false prophetic indictments. I am less sure, however, about Springs’ proposal that “any would-be prophet in democratic public life must strive not to be simply a virtuous oncologist, but a virtuous pharmacologist.” As James Gustafson and others have noted, prophetic indictment tends to be both negative and utopian: it decries social evils without proposing a clear plan for amelioration. It is one thing to prophetically decry with certainty a pressing social problem (e.g., climate change, economic inequality). But I think it is important for those engaging in prophetic indictment to realize that the same certainty they bring to identifying a problem may not carry over to the proposed solution. I suspect that one reason King’s later writings on the Vietnam War and social and economic inequality were not as well-received as his earlier work on race equality is that the remedies for the problems of the late 1960’s weren’t as obvious.

I certainly agree with Maya that both prophetic indictment and practical deliberation are essential forms of discourse. I also agree that many public intellectuals, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., have engaged in both forms of discourse over the course of their careers. The rhetoric of the Letter from a Birmingham Jail is not the same as the rhetoric in the “I Have a Dream” speech. My point is that it is very difficult to combine them in the same speech act, because they operate in very different ways—both theoretically, and more importantly, in practice. This difficulty is exacerbated in cases of highly controversial political and moral questions, which I think accounts for some of the fruitlessness of “culture war” debates.

Fundamentally, the job of practical deliberation or policy analysis is to consider what should be the law. Pro-lifers and pro-choicers debate about whether the fetus is an equally protectable human being, whether taking its life counts as homicide, etc. Arguments are offered and rebutted in turn. No ad hominem attacks are necessary to conduct the deliberations and debate. In contrast, indictments, including prophetic indictments, take the law as a presupposition for its work. The question at issue in an indictment is whether a particular person—a defendant—violated that law. Debates about the wisdom of the law are off the table —the only question is its violation. This distinction is regularly enforced in courtrooms: If I am indicted for theft, no judge will be patient with my efforts to call into question the wisdom of the law protecting private property. That debate takes place in another venue, namely the chambers of the legislature. Conversely, a zealous prosecutor who indicts me for behavior that he thinks should be illegal—but is not in fact against the law—is not only likely to outrage the defendant—he is also likely to be charged with misconduct.

In my view, prophetic indictment operates rhetorically in a manner that is very similar to an actual indictment. It is one thing to indict an interlocutor for behavior that violates what everyone agrees is the law. It’s another thing entirely to indict an interlocutor for behavior that violates what the prophet thinks should be against the law—is not in fact a violation. So if I call fellow citizens “murderers” for their stance on abortion, they are likely to interpret this as an ad hominem attack, and respond accordingly. Most likely, their resentment at what they perceive to be the unjust insult will adversely affect their ability and willingness to hear the reasons behind the indictment. So that’s why I worry about “mixed” discourse—at least if the mixture takes place in the same conversation. The point I am trying to make is limited, but from a practical point of view, fairly important: If you are making an intervention in the public square, you really need to ask yourself what your aim is: if you really want people to change their minds, don’t insult them. It’s only likely to backfire.

So perhaps what Maya, Springs, and I need to do is speak with more specificity about different ways of mixing practical reasoning and prophetic indictment. I suspect that some combinations—on some subjects, and practiced by some people—could be very fruitful. Other combinations, however, might not be as successful.

Finally, Vincent Lloyd’s observation about the importance of spectators raises a key complication for my analysis. Call it the problem of audience. As he points out, many people watch political debates that they don’t directly engage. Furthermore, many people read about debates that took place long before they were ever born—like millennials encountering the writings of Martin Luther King. Suppose, then, that the purpose of prophetic indictment is not, actually, to change the mind of the targets of the indictment. Suppose, instead, that it is targeting some of the spectators. A prophetic indictment could be designed to ignite the enthusiasm of one’s own troops in the culture war, or to rope into the cause the sympathetic but insufficiently committed, or to dissuade the ambivalent from taking an opposing stand. Alternatively, perhaps some prophetic critics see their work as designed to inspire and edify those living in a future age. Certainly, King’s writings, as well as the writings of the abolitionists who lived a century before King, now function that way.

I don’t yet know how to tame this problem. If Lloyd is correct, and I believe he is, political theologians and philosophers not only need to grapple with the fact that we have different speakers and different types of discourse in the public square. We also need to contend with the reality that speakers have many different audiences—targets and allies as well as eavesdroppers. Speakers may even have multiple purposes for a single rhetorical intervention. Needless to say, wrestling with this problem of audience will require us to develop far beyond the conception of the public square as a sterile seminar room. If my book contributes in some small way to this development, I will be very gratified.

Cathleen Kaveny is Darald and Juliet Libby Professor of Theology and Law at Boston College. A scholar of both jurisprudence and moral theology, she has published over one hundred articles in both scholarly and popular venues particularly on themes of law and religious ethics in pluralistic contexts. Her next book Ethics at the Edges of Law: Christian Ethics and the American Legal Tradition is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

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Cathleen Kaveny
Professor Cathleen Kaveny, a scholar who focuses on the relationship of law, religion, and morality, joined the Boston College faculty in 2014 as the Darald and Juliet Libby Professor, a position that includes appointments in both the department of theology and the law school.  Her research interests include the relationship of law, religion, and morality in pluralistic societies, health care ethics, rhetoric and ethics, the relationship of mercy and justice, and complicity with wrongdoing.
Theorizing Modernities article

Cultivating the Virtue of Watching Well


Earlier this summer my wife and I did what many Americans did. After putting our daughter to sleep, we watched the speeches of the Republican and Democratic conventions. We saw angry speeches, religious speeches, comforting speeches, lofty speeches, and incoherent speeches. Like others, when I say we watch the conventions, I do not mean that we have been passively absorbing what we see on our iPad. Watching implies something much more expansive. In part, it implies evaluating reasons. In part, it implies feelings being elicited. Most importantly, watching implies judgment. We consider whether the speeches we are seeing are truthful, whether they are good, whether they are beautiful, and we consider their relationship to the world around us. Do they match the way the world is? Do they distort the world? Do they make us think about the world in a new way? We address these questions collectively, in conversations between spouses, at the proverbial water cooler, or on social media.

I want to invite further reflection on this role of the spectator, on this practice of watching. It is as close to a universal practice as they come. Whatever part of the world, whatever historical moment, there were people watching, judging, discussing judgments, and acting on those judgments. The public square might seem as if it is about rhetorical performance, but actually it is just as much, if not more, about watching. Watching, in an active and expansive sense, is the form politics takes for most people. We are all experienced and skilled at watching. We know what genres of public performance we may encounter, we know what good and bad versions of such performances look like, and we can sense when we are affected by performances, when they make us look anew at an aspect of the world. This is culturally specific knowledge of what public performance looks like here, now, but it is also a broadly shared capacity to appreciate and evaluate performances wherever we find ourselves.

It is also true that public speech may distort or deceive. It may mute our capacity to judge, implanting in us views the speaker wishes to advance but that we would not otherwise accept. This should not be reduced to emotion muting reason; the dynamics at play are much more complex, and playing a game of reasons can just as easily distort judgment by muting emotion. To watch well is a virtue, and the more of that virtue one possesses, the less likely that public speech can distort. It is a virtue required by democracy: the people do not rule if they cannot watch their leaders well – then it would be the leaders who rule. (Political theorists including Jeffrey Green and Bryan Garsten have recently pushed in this direction.[1])

Cathleen Kaveny expands how we think about public discourse to include not only practical deliberation but also prophetic indictment. I am curious how her carefully developed thoughts on prophetic indictment might appear from the perspective of the spectator who is, like me, watching the public square via his iPad. From that perspective, it is quite clear that what appears to be practical deliberation on an issue like torture (as Kaveny rightly points out), or on any issue at all, is about quite a bit more than exchanging reasons. There are genre conventions to practical deliberation, unspoken premises, ways of framing issues that lean on emotion, and so on. Similarly, when we watch a prophetic indictment we do not simply absorb the power of the “moral chemotherapy.” We compare it against genre conventions, evaluate the aesthetics (from tone of voice to the speaker’s clothing), and we consider the extent to which what we hear matches against what we know of the world – or the extent to which what we hear allows us to see the world anew.

In thoughtfully distinguishing practical deliberation and prophetic indictment, Kaveny has isolated two genres of public discourse found in the American public square. As genres, they seem to me best presented in a descriptive rather than a normative voice. I have a hard time believing that most examples of practical deliberation or prophetic indictment are morally salient. Rarely does talk in the public square have an effect; most of the time it is moralizing, using the language of morality without actually speaking morally. What does strike me as morally salient are (1) exceptionally good examples of either mode of public discourse; and (2) cultivating the virtue of watching well regardless of what it is one is watching. To get at those exceptionally good examples – say, Kaveny’s examples of King or Lincoln – what we need is not a set of criteria. Those criteria merely describe the genre. What we need is the virtue of watching well so that we effortlessly recognize excellence in public performance.

At the end of the day, there is a chance that we scholars may spread insights into how the virtue of watching is cultivated, but there is little chance that we will succeed in persuading public figures to speak differently.

[1] Jeffrey E. Green, The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

Vincent Lloyd is Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University. His research treats the philosophy of religion, religion and politics, and race. His most recent book is Black Natural Law (Oxford, 2016), and he co-edits the journal Political Theology.

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Vincent Lloyd
Vincent Lloyd is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies and Director of the Center for Political Theology at Villanova University. His recent books include Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination, Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons (with Joshua Dubler), and Black Natural Law; he co-edits the journal Political Theology. He has held visiting positions at Notre Dame, Emory, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Durham. Lloyd is currently writing a book about abuse.