'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

'Contesting Religions' in Atlanta

I've been at a conference in Atlanta for the past couple of days. It's organized by the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and the general theme is global religious issues.

I admit that one of the main reasons I came was because I was supposed to be on a panel with the Israeli writer Avishai Margalit and the Iranian scholar Abdel-Karim Suroush-- both of them people I was interested in meeting. So neither of them was actually here. I was a bit taken aback to discover that. But as it happens I've met lots of really interesting people and participated in lots of really interesting discussions.

Highlights have included listening in on a discussion among African scholars of indigenous African religions and Chinese scholars of indigenouse Chinese (folk-)religions, and gaining an idea of both the hardiness and the richness of some of those traditions; participating in a workshop on religion and violence today, where some really deep and significant differences emerged; lots of conversations; a talk by UN Population Fund head Thuraya Obeid, yesterday; and a performance of jazz and gospel music by the Atlanta Community Jazz Choir this evening.

Sorry this is such a lame little report here. I'm a tired, tired person. This morning I actually gave a 30-minute plenary presentation on "Religion and Violence", in which I wanted to present some of my Africa work to this group. Some very, very supportive reactions; some not so much so. That's okay.

My bottom-line theseis was something along the lines of, that at and after times of intense trauma social breakdown, people often turn to religion and religions have a lot of influence over people's lives, thinking, and behavior; at this point, religions can do one of two things: they can either work to heal people's hurt and enrol these people in broader projects of social healing, or they can harden people's sadness into anger and steer them toward vengefulness and punitiveness, which often come cloaked in the garb of "justice"...

Oh well, I know I haven't expressed it well here. I talked a bit in the afternoon workshop today about the truly amazing way the Mozambican people managed to trasncend all the hurt from their lengthy and atrocious civil war by using approaches based on blanket amnesty and wide use of social healing. And this German scholar afterwards kept insisting to me, "But there has to be justice! What about justice??" What could I say? "Hey, don't attack me I'm just reporting what they did and telling you that from every perspective I know of it surely seems to have worked. If the Mozambicans say they are satisfied with the results, what standing do you (or I) have to tell them, No it didn't?"

L'esprit de l'escalier, here. That's why I have the blog... Tomorrow, we go to the Martin Luther King, Jr., Museum.