Displaying: 81-100 of 283 documents

0.098 sec

81. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 8 > Issue: 1
Philippe Buc War and Religion: Europe and the Mediterranean from the First through the Twenty-first Centuries. Arnaud Blin
82. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 8 > Issue: 1
Don J. Wyatt Religious Culture and Violence in Traditional China. Barend ter Haar
83. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 8 > Issue: 1
Katherine Allen Smith Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream: The Crusades, Apocalyptic Prophecy, and the End of History. Jay Rubenstein
84. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 8 > Issue: 1
John Soboslai Confronting Religious Violence: A Counternarrative. Richard A. Burridge and Jonathan Sacks, editors
85. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 8 > Issue: 1
Aaron Ricker The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld
86. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 8 > Issue: 1
Zebulon Dingley The Transfiguration of Lukas Pkech: Dini ya Msambwa and the “Kolloa Affray”
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
This article explores a violent episode in Kenya’s late-colonial history in which a confrontation between police and members of an anti-colonial religious movement called Dini ya Msambwa resulted an estimated fifty deaths. Drawing on archival documents and interviews with survivors, I reconstruct the event—the “Kolloa Affray,” as it became known—before showing how its violence has been preserved and transformed in the historical theology and ritual practice of the Dini ya Roho Mafuta Pole ya Afrika, which claims to be a continuation of the Msambwa movement. For survivors of the violence itself, and for others who suffered communal punishment in its aftermath, it is an historical wrong for which the British government owes compensation. For the Mafuta Pole faithful, however, the death of Dini ya Msambwa’s leader Lukas Pkech at Kolowa becomes a kind of second crucifixion, “cancelling” the violence of the past and ushering in a new era of forgiveness and reconciliation. The simultaneous preservation and negation of this violent past in Mafuta Pole historical consciousness is shown through an analysis of its discursive, ritual, and memorial practices.
87. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 8 > Issue: 1
Margo Kitts Introduction to the Journal of Religion and Violence, Volume 8, Issue 1
88. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 8 > Issue: 1
Robert Blunt Anthropology After Dark: Nocturnal Life and the Anthropology of the Good-Enough in Western Kenya
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
Sherry Ortner has recently described Marxian and Foucauldian inspired anthropological concerns for power, domination, and inequality as “dark anthropology.” In juxtaposition, Joel Robbins has challenged anthropologists to explore ideas of the good life, conceptions of value, and ethics in different ethnographic contexts; what he calls an “anthropology of the good.” Between these poles, this paper attempts an anthropology of the “good enough” to examine beliefs and practices that may partially, and counterintuitively, ground local conceptions of trust in the gray areas of social life. The phenomenon of “nightrunning” amongst the Bukusu of western Kenya, I argue, undergirds a noctural economy of lending and borrowing—rather than theft and victimhood—of reproductive potential; nightrunners remove their clothing at night to “bang their buttocks” against their neighbors’ closed doors and throw rocks at their roofs to prevent them from “sleeping,” a euphemism for sexual intercourse. Due to the way Bukusu understand nightrunners to be sterile unless they “run,” while annoying, they are nonetheless considered deserving of sympathy. Key here is that Bukusu do not necessarily see such seemingly absorptive nocturnal activity as witchcraft. While the identities of nightrunners are protected by the darkness of night—a chronotope which usually indexes witchcraft and political corruption—Bukusu claim that nightrunners are categorically people that one knows “in the light of day.” The paper explores how practices like nightrunning might help us rethink social intimacy and trust.
89. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 8 > Issue: 1
Justin J. Meggitt The Problem of Apocalyptic Terrorism
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
The concept of “apocalyptic terrorism” has become common in the study of terrorism since the turn of the millennium and some have made considerable claims about its analytical and practical utility. However, it raises substantial problems. Following a brief survey of the way that the idea has been employed, this paper identifies difficulties inherent in its current use. In addition to those of a definitional kind, these include the treatment of “apocalyptic” as a synonym for “religious”; the assumption that apocalyptic is always primary and totalizing; homogenizing claims about the character of apocalyptic radicalism; mistaken assumptions about the causes and character of apocalyptic violence; problematic cross-cultural and non-religious applications of the term “apocalyptic”; the neglect of hermeneutics; and the dearth of contributions by specialists in the study of religion. The argument concludes that there are good grounds for abandoning the notion of “apocalyptic terrorism” entirely, but given that this is unlikely, it should be employed far more cautiously, and a narrower, more tightly defined understanding of the concept should be advocated by those engaged in the study of terrorism.
90. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Faisal Devji Speaking of Violence
91. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Kjersti Hellesøy Civil War and the Radicalization of Islam in Chechnya
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
In this article I will focus on the recent developments in Islam in Chechnya in terms of the question, “How do we understand the radicalization of Islam in Chechnya in terms of the conflicts in the 1990s?” As a way of sorting this out, I will be making reference to Monica Duffy Toft’s discussion of the conditionsthat increase the probability of a civil war becoming a religious war, and her analysis of the role religion can play in such conflicts. There are elements of her analysis that I do not use, and in the latter part of this article I will argue that one component of her approach – namely her essentialization of religion and itsconnection with violence – is misconceived.
92. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Maria Leppäkari Apocalyptic Scapegoats
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
This article highlights the impact of endtime representations in relation to concepts of an apocalyptic enemy. Apocalyptic violence, as related here, involves three parties: Jewish Temple activists, Christian Zionists and their common apocalyptic enemy, Islam. Violence is always present in endtime representations, but it does not necessarily involve physical confrontation. Violence has a double nature. René Girard calls it a two-edged sword, which can be used to oppress as well as to liberate. The role prescribed by Christian Zionists (CZ) to the Jewish Third Temple activists and vice versa is here addressed in light of Girard’s theory of the scapegoat as presented in Violence and the Sacred [1977] (2005) and in Leppäkari’s previous studies, such as, Apocalyptic Representations of Jerusalem (2006) and Hungry for Heaven (2008). Here the double nature of violence accounts for the point that violence can stain or cleanse, contaminate or purify, drive humans to fury and murder or appease their anger and restore them to life. When set in an apocalyptic context the double nature of violence enables dissemination of images of threat and xenophobia, yielding physical confrontation.
93. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
James R. Lewis Sects and Violence: The “Standard Model” of New Religions Violence
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
In contrast with other subfields within religion-and-violence studies, the study of violence and new religious movements (NRMs) has tended to focus on a small set of incidents involving the mass deaths of members of controversial NRMs. Beginning with the suicide-murders of hundreds of members of the People’sTemple in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978, various explanations of such incidents have been offered – some focusing on the psychological make-up of the leaders; others on the near approach of the new millennium. Scholars of violent new religions eventually settled on what might be called the ‘Standard Model’ of NRM violence, a model that takes into account internal factors, external factors and the dynamic polarization between these two sets of influences. Unfortunately, this model is not predictive. However, if the various factors within the standard model are reshuffled, several new factors added and the focus shifted to violent incidents involving group suicide, a modified model emergences that appears to be able to predict mass suicide in NRMs.
94. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
David Svensson Fundamentalism in the Modern World. Volume 2. Fundamentalism and Communication: Culture, Media and the Public Sphere., Ulrika Mårtensson, Jennifer Bailey, Priscilla Ringrose & Asbjørn Dyrendal, eds.
95. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Göran Larsson Islamismen., Bjørn Olav Utvik
96. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Gustavo Morello, S.J. Christianity and Revolution: Catholicism and Guerrilla Warfare in Argentina’s Seventies
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
Through an analysis of the journal Cristianismo y Revolución (Buenos Aires, 1966-1971), this paper highlights the conditions that made the link between certain Catholic groups and revolutionary movements possible during the Sixties in Argentina. The changes in Christian conscience characterized by the attempts the Catholic Church made during the twentieth century to face the Modern era, and by developing a concern for structural social problems, were the primary influences that led some Catholics to the Left. Moral concern with the poor, the success of the Cuban Revolution and the political situation in Argentina and throughout Latin America laid the foundation for revolutionary activity.
97. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
James R. Lewis Introduction
98. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
R. Scott Appleby The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological Perspectives on Religion, Violence, and History., Charles B. Strozier, David M. Terman & James W. Jones (with Katharine A. Boyd), eds.
99. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Jesper Aagaard Petersen Holy Terror: Understanding Religion and Violence in Popular Culture., Eric Christianson and Christopher Partridge, eds.
100. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Michael J. Walsh States of Exception: The Violence of Territoriality, Sacrality, and Religion in China-Tibet Relations
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
The relationship between sovereign violence, constitutional language, territorial claims, and certain human rights such as the freedom of religion plays out in complex ways in China-Tibet relations with broad ramifications for other nation-states. This essay begins to explore some of these ramifications. In terms ofChinese sovereignty, Tibet is part of what China’s constitution refers to as “sacred territory” and as such is exclusively beholden to the Chinese state. To claim constitutionally that one’s sovereign territory is sacred, as in a space to be set apart precisely so as to be able to control it through a politicized inclusivity, is tantamount to the process of territorialization becoming a type of sacralization, a rendering of social and geographical space as inviolate. I argue that territorialization by the nation-state, in this case China, is in fact a form of sacralization bolstered by mythos and sovereign violence. Implicated in claims of sacrality is the language of human rights, and for the purposes of this paper, China’s constitutional claim of freedom of religion. To employ the term religion, however, is to unwittingly bind oneself to a European Protestant narrative and all the complications thereof. Both claims have deep implications for juridical constructions, the containment of populace, freedom of religion, and human rights in general.