Religious Conflict Project- Emory's Religion and Conflict Working Group

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The Meaning and End of Religious Conflict:
A Departmental Teaching and Learning Initiative

Goals and Objectives of the Project: Over a Three Year Period
Outline of the Design of the Project

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Goals and Objectives of the Project: Over a Three Year Period

YEAR ONE

To become familiar as a department with the canonical literature on religion and conflict, focusing on theory, case studies, and practical applications.
To host a University-wide seminar on this topic, focusing on recent mediations in situations of political strife fueled by religion.
To host a para-conference for the Graduate Division of Religion, featuring the relevant work of graduate students both at Emory and nationwide.
To offer sessions within the para-conference that train graduate students who wish to integrate this distinct pedagogical approach to religion and conflict into their teaching program at Emory (TATTO)
With other Departments and Divisions, to use our knowledge to teach and support the development of active mediation skills for our undergraduates and community partners in situations of religious conflict.

YEAR TWO

To develop a departmental course on Religion and Conflict which can be taught by any professor in the department and will be offered on a yearly basis.
To develop out of our study a distinct pedagogical approach to religious conflict for use in religious studies classrooms, or as a component in classrooms of other disciplines.
To strengthen this pedagogical approach by active use of Emory’s Theory Practice Learning model experience-based/community-based learning) already housed within the Religion Department.
To support a Fellow in Religion and Conflict in the Religion Department. This Fellow would follow the existent model for Fellows in the Department: teaching, over a three week period, including two public talks, a one week seminar, and guest lectures in a variety of classes within the department and beyond. This Fellow would focus particularly on pedagogical methods and approaches to religious conflict, including the reduction of violence.

YEAR THREE

To offer workshops within the University that feature this developed pedagogical approach. The substance of these workshops would be the meaning and end of religious conflict; the teaching methods would be those developed over two years’ hard work at Emory.
To offer the same kinds of workshops within our professional societies and other universities in America.
To develop a Teaching Resource Packet which other groups in Colleges and universities could use in their own pedagogical environments.

Outline of the Design of the Project

In a recent lecture “The Origins of the Idea of Genius,” Catherine Stimpson argues that the idea of the solitary genius has been gradually replaced by the idea of a co-operative community, creative individuals working together. When pressed on how she might define genius in the twenty-first century, she answered that she would define it in terms of the issues that people identified as “resolvable,” and the kinds of communities that might gather to resolve it. She went on to say that one area in which she felt true creativity might be nurtured is in addressing new ways of resolving conflict.

Following Stimpson’s model of creativity, both in content and in form, the intellectual community that is the Religion Department at Emory University would like to explore and develop new ways of teaching the meaning and end of religious conflict. We are a group of people whose “genius” is located within intellectual community, and who agree with Stimpson that one of the major founts of creativity will be in developing new approaches to teaching and learning about religious conflict. This initiative grows directly out of shared research interests which span across the Department: Thee Smith’s publications in conflict resolution and violence reduction; Bobbi Patterson’s work on violence and the body, and in developing a new Minor in Violence Studies; David Blumenthal’s recent work on acts of conscience within the Holocaust; Deborah Lipstadt’s work on violence, history and Holocaust denial; Eric Reinders’ work on iconoclasm and religious conflict; Wendy Farley’s recent publications on theology and domestic violence, to name just a few. This is an very opportune moment for the Department as our research interests grow naturally into pedagogical commitments.

Thus, before we begin to think about religious conflict, a word about the nature of those pedagogical commitments is in order. Our commitments to teaching and learning are several. First, for the last few years, we have been attempting to integrate experience outside the classroom with rigorous learning in the classroom. We call this the Theory-Practice Learning approach, and one of its major proponents and a member of our working group, Bobbi Patterson, has been developing these ideas over the course of five or six years. The approach assumes that philosophy can and should be informed by practice and vice-versa. For instance, as one colleague put it, “Hegel can and should be relevant to building homes and building homes can and should be relevant to Hegel.” Classroom teaching in religion, then, always involves work in the outside world, not as a nod to “service” but as a commitment to integrate the two worlds in radical, basic ways.

Second, we are committed to team-teaching as a basic value. Our Religion 100 course focuses on two major religious traditions, and is frequently taught by two professors who are experts in that tradition. This encourages intellectual collegiality amongst ourselves and models it for students. Moreover, team-teaching tends to be interdisciplinary. It assumes that the exploration of more than one approach to a problem in the study of religion is always a good thing, and that students can and should learn the skills of methodological pluralism in the study of religion.

Third and finally, we are committed to violence reduction. One of the leading theorists of this approach in the study of religion, Thee Smith, who also is a member of our working group, argues that our central teaching question might be: “Why does religion sometimes appear to be the 'cure' for social violence, and yet also and at the same time its cause?” This has been many scholars’ intellectual question (see, for instance, Wallace and Smith, Curing Violence) but how does that work in the classroom? A number of us have developed particular approaches to reducing intellectual violence in the classroom–stereotyping, prejudice, and so on–both of the self and of the other. We also intend to build on existing faculty and student relationships with local communities, including ethnic and religious communities. To be sure, this is a value that most Professors of Religion would embrace; however, members of our department have systematically developed specific skills to deal with these issues. How do these pedagogical commitments translate into an intellectual approach to religious conflict?

Taking a page from the book of the late W.C. Smith, we are prepared to investigate and to teach the “meaning” of religious conflict not only in terms of its semantic history, but also the valences it takes on in our everyday speech and the ways we practice it in our everyday lives. How do our religious discourses define themselves in such a way that conflict with other religious traditions is inevitable? What are the seeds of conflict within each religious tradition? How do we teach this in our classrooms as accurately, openly and honestly as possible? What new pedagogical methods are necessary to meet these goals? Moreover, we intend to explore and develop new ways of teaching and learning the end of religious conflict. Again, following W. C. Smith, we do not mean simply the ultimate cessation of such conflict, but an honest exploration of the goals inherent in such conflict. Are there ways of resolving religious conflict wherein certain ends could be clarified and met? What are the seeds of the resolution of conflict within each religious tradition? How do we teach these in our classroom as accurately, openly, and honestly as possible? What new pedagogical methods are necessary to meet these goals?

Let us note here that we are assuming that “religious conflict” per se is not necessarily to be condemned; that conflict between religious traditions may in fact be a fruitful thing –theologically and practically–for both parties. We are also assuming that religious conflict can contain the seeds of religious violence and hinder human flourishing. Conflict, per se, is a category that can be either a productive or a destructive dynamic between religious traditions. Moreover, conflict is increasingly part of recent definitions of religion per se. The work of Chidester, Linenthal, and Grapard, among others, increasingly define religion itself as a space of contestation. Moreover, we want to assume a balance between theological and descriptive categories. Some of our investigations into new teaching practices will engage the normative categories from within the five major world traditions, and others will engage the historical and descriptive analyses of particular religious attitudes. This is Emory’s particular gift; we have not yet given up on the dialogue between the theological and the historical studies of the world’s major religious traditions. We intend to use this intellectual gift in our investigations.

The Initial Year: Teaching and Learning in the University

1) Departmental Intellectual Life Meetings

In the department we have inaugurated the “Working Group on Religious Conflict,” consisting of Thee Smith, Bobbi Patterson, Gary Laderman, Eric Reinders, and Laurie Patton. This group will be responsible for the curriculum of the “Intellectual Life” meetings of the Department. Next year, in our Intellectual Life gatherings, we will focus entirely on the theme of religious conflict. We will begin by familiarizing ourselves with the emerging theoretical literature on the theme of religion and conflict. We will then proceed to a series of case studies of religious conflict, both successfully and unsuccessfully resolved.

2) The Hosted Seminar

We plan to end our year with another tradition, recently begun within the Department, a university-wide “Hosted Seminar.” This is a seminar for the Emory community, focusing on interdisciplinary issues in the study of religion. In the Department we assume that, because religion is inherently interdisciplinary in nature, it should therefore be of benefit to the entire University and should share its inquiry at a university-wide level. We expect this event to be part of Emory’s “Year of Reconciliation,” planned for AY 2000-2001. President William Chace, Chancellor William Frye, and Provost Rebecca Chopp have called for a year of special programs and activities which focus on reconciliation as a theme in our scholarly work.

This Hosted Seminar of the department will thereby be receiving widely distributed forms of publicity and other forms of in-kind support. Our hosted seminar topic for April, 2001, is “Religion and Conflict,” and our plenary speaker, who has already accepted our invitation, is David Little, Harvard University. Professor Little has a great deal of experience in mediating actual religious conflicts, and has published over thirteen books on comparative religious ethics, interdisciplinary knowledge, and particular case studies of religious conflict in the Ukraine, Sri Lanka, and between Islam and the West, to name a few. Interest in this topic is so keen at the University level that the Humanities Council at Emory University has agreed to have this lecture serve as the annual university-wide “Humanities Lecture” for the year 2000-2001. Professor Little will then lead a three day seminar, featuring members of the entire University community, philosophers, political scientists, anthropologists, and so on.

In the seminar we hope to explore topics of religious conflict in more depth, with Little’s great experience in mediating religious conflict all over the world. We also hope to gain from the expertise of Professor David Chidester, who will act as respondent to David Little throughout his plenary talk as well as in the seminar. Finally, Little and Chidester will meet with members of the Religion Department to discuss the readings that they have been exploring throughout the year. This reading group model has been a highly successful departmental practice in the past, and we intend to build on its success for our future. One of the major questions we will think about in this seminar is: how is mediation itself an effective teaching and learning tool?

3) Paraconference

In Academic Year 2000-2001 we intend to hold a “paraconference” of graduate students within the Graduate Division of Religion (GDR)–the arm of the study of religion at Emory that trains graduate students. This paraconference will follow the pattern of graduate student conferences in other departments, encompassing a call for papers, panel discussions, and respondents which allow graduates students to give papers in a constructive environment. Many graduate students currently working in the GDR are thinking about this topic in Christian Theological Studies, Ethics, West and South Asian Religions, and so on. This paraconference will include a teaching training session which will embrace the realities of religious contestation in the classroom. We hope to draw on the graduate students’ themselves as resources for developing new pedagogical strategies for teaching and learning about religious conflict.

4) Peer Mediation as a Model for Thinking About Religion

The Department is already sponsoring a Peer Mediation project at Emory University, in which trained student mediators work towards alternative methods of dispute resolution. We see this as an integral part of a liberal arts education. Throughout all three years, we would like to work with student mediators during their regular meetings to explore a central question about mediation: in what ways is mediation itself an effective pedagogical tool, both in the religious studies classroom and in the liberal arts classroom as a whole? Let us expand on this idea. In a recent issue of Spotlight on Teaching, Thee Smith and Bobbi Patterson argue that the most effective way to teach religion is to teach all the way through the conflicts. That is, one should study the ways in which religions provide their own sources for exclusion as well as inclusion of other religious faiths. According to Smith (Curing Violence, 1994) if one identifies the sources for the perpetuation as well as the resolution of religious conflict, one has begun to acquire a thorough knowledge of a religious tradition. The major insights, as well as the major stumbling blocks, of each religious tradition, can be viewed through particular sites of historical and theological conflict. The process of learning about a religious conflict is very similar to the process of mediation. Despite its practical results, mediation is essentially an analytical tool. In mediation, the first step is to take a thorough history of the conflict, from all sides of the dispute. The perspectives of all parties are analyzed in order to identify common issues which hinder the resolution of the conflict. Then, options are explored in which various resolutions are imagined by all parties. These options are refined until a resolution is reached.

In certain approaches to mediation, all parties are encouraged to redescribe the conflict after they have reached a resolution. In the religion classroom, a student takes the history of a religious conflict from as many sides as possible. What were the sources and media of communication or misunderstanding? What were the strengths and weaknesses in relationships between insiders and outsiders? He or she then moves to exploring common possibilities for resolution of that conflict–the “what if?” questions so essential to any liberal arts classroom. The moment of exploring the options of resolution might also be called the beginnings of moral engagement. These are the ponderings of one’s own moral and ethical and historical choices. How might I have taken a stand in relationship to this conflict in the history of religions? What is the option for resolution that I can best imagine? The project of enacting one of those options is, of course, the project of a lifetime.

In the model of mediation as a form of thinking about religion, then, there is less polarization between history and theology; between data-gathering and ethics; between the descriptive and the normative. At each stage of thinking, these two aspects interact with each other and inform each other. We would like to test this tentative hypothesis in our work with students in the Peer Mediation Program, begun at Emory University under the dual sponsorship of the Religion Department and the Office of Campus Life. First, we will work with two groups of students: those who are actively engaged in resolving conflicts, and those who are actively engaged in learning about religions. Choosing five students from each group, we will ask them to analyze particular case studies on the basis of their experience either as mediators or as students of interreligious conflict. We will compare the results of their analyses as a way of refining our mediation as a model of thinking about religion.

The Second Year: Integrating Learning into Pedagogical Commitments

This period of intensive learning is a necessary prelude to our main goal: the integration of this learning about conflict and religion into concrete pedagogical commitments. We intend to follow several steps at the end of the first year and moving into the second.

End of First Year, Beginning of Second:

1) The Class: Religion and Conflict

We intend to launch our class, “Religion and Conflict,” during the spring 2001, which will complement our “Hosted Seminar” and graduate student “paraconference” on Religion and Conflict that will occur during the same semester. The Department has offered this class once before, taught by Thee Smith and Rich Martin (see article). We intend to integrate the activities during spring 2001 into the course–making attendance and reporting on conference activities a requirement for students taking the “Religion and Conflict” class. We also intend on making this a “staple” class, regularly offered in the department on an annual or biannual basis.

2) The Internship: Religion and Conflict

As part of the Department’s commitment to a Theory Practice Learning approach, we have developed a Religion Internship class that offers a place for religion majors to engage in analytical and ethical reflection about a particular kind of service with the community that they have chosen. This is applied learning in a supervised work experience, utilizing skills related to concentrations in religion in such areas a community service, education, and social work. We would like to develop the Internship program to include at least one or two Internships every year focusing on the issue of religion and conflict. These issues could be anything from religious justifications for domestic violence, to conflicts between two neighborhoods in Atlanta which are partly religiously motivated, to developing ecumenical dialogues. The existence of Violence Studies, Women’s Studies, and the Center for Ethics at Emory also provide support for resources, conversation partners, and speakers in this endeavor.

3) “Changing the Classroom” Task Force

Perhaps the most important part of our second year will be the careful discussions about how we integrate our learning into new approaches to religion and conflict. The Working Group will host ongoing discussions as to how the information and theory we learned from the first year can be put to use in new ways–both in the classroom and, eventually, within our local communities. We plan to invite both departmental and non-departmental faculty to this endeavor. Our goal is to come up with nothing less than a coherent, innovative, pedagogical approach to this issues of religion and conflict over the course of the year. If we knew what the new approaches were, we wouldn’t be writing this grant proposal; however, we do have some questions we would like to ask:

Can mediation itself be seen as a distinct pedagogical approach in the religious studies classroom?
In what ways can we use specific cases of religion and conflict to help students learn the historical particularities of religious traditions?
In what ways can we use specific cases of religion and conflict to help students learn the theological and philosophical particularities of religious traditions?
In what ways does recent theory on religion and conflict imply a distinct pedagogical approach to teaching religion? Does it link up with larger theory in the study of religion? Does this theory imply that we teach our “Methods” classes (REL 300 and REL 490) differently than we have in the past?
In what ways can we involve other disciplines in our study of religion and conflict?
Might we develop a series, or workbook, of case studies, that allows us to teach issues in the study of religion more effectively? This approach works very well in a “law school” environment; might it also be a kind of Theory Practice Learning approach that could work with undergraduates? We also know that the “Case Study” group in the field of religion has recently been trying to re-energize itself, and perhaps we could learn something from them. (Eg: Case studies might look like, The Case of Bosnia: Learning About Christianity and Islam, etc. )
In what ways can we use the Web as a teaching and learning tool concerning these issues?

We intend, at the end of the year, to come up with a full proposal for a workshop, including case studies, sample syllabi, and other resources that can be used in a series of workshops throughout the nation in the final, third year.

The Third Year: Workshops at Emory, Atlanta, and Across the U.S.

With a fully developed set of approaches, syllabi, and case studies, we would like to take our “show on the road” in year three’s series of workshops. We intend to begin at Emory, more broadly, and then branch out to other universities and colleges in Atlanta, as well as religion departments in universities and colleges nationwide. We also expect our community partners to be part of our team, either through co-developed resources, actual presence in presentations, and so on. These workshops would involve one or two faculty members from Emory. They would take place over one-two day periods, with the goal of developing a set of approaches; a syllabus; and a set of case studies specific to each learning environment we visit.

The Visiting Fellow in Religion and Conflict

In order to help us think through these workshops and our new pedagogical approaches, we would also like to sponsor a Visiting Fellow in Religion and Conflict for years two and three. This person would be in residence for the better part of a month, offering seminars on his or her area of expertise, and helping the working group think through pedagogical issues for the classroom as well as the workshop design for the third year. As mentioned above, we would like this Fellow to explore ways in which meditation itself is a distinct pedagogical approach of particular value in the study of religion. In addition, this person would offer a university-wide seminar on some aspect of the issue of religion and conflict, as David Little will do in our first year.

Plan for Disseminating the Results

First, our workshops in the third year will be the most effective way to disseminate the results of the project. As part of these workshops, we intend to develop a Teaching Resource Packet which involves a specific, yet broadly applicable set of tools in the teaching of conflict and religion. These would include sample syllabi, class-based exercises and activities, methods of evaluation, etc. Second, we could devote an entire issue of Spotlight on Teaching to highlight these new approaches. Third, we will of course write a jointly authored article for Teaching Theology and Religion. We hope that the workshops on approaches to teaching religion and conflict might continue after the third year, on a less intense schedule. Our developed resources will continue to be available, and our campus- and community-based initiatives for positive change in areas of religious conflict will continue.

Evaluation of the Results

First, we intend to work with students and community partners involved in the first year conferences over the course of their time here at Emory. What did they learn in the conference? What advice will they give us as we move forward into the next stage of integration into curriculum and workshop planning? Second, we intend to work with our Visiting Fellow in an evaluative capacity at the end of each visit: what might he or she have done differently each year? What does he or she think of the workability of our new pedagogical approaches, and so on? This report could be submitted to Wabash. Third, we intend to use student evaluations of classes that have our new approaches integrated into them–both the regularly offered Religion and Conflict class, and other regularly offered classes. Fourth, we intend to work with our Division of Educational Studies in developing an evaluative questionnaire for our workshop participants as we move into the “workshop” phase.