Shalom, Professor Staub

As a semester of blogging comes to a close, reflection is necessary in order to mark change and look back over the great amount of information gained over the semester.  Thinking back over the full course, 3 specific things that I will take and apply to real life are an understanding that all religions have the capacity for peace and at the same time, violence, a knowledge that religious discourse can be used to transform a situation from secular to religious in nature, and a recognition that peace making needs to use the same language as the groups in conflict in order to understand the conflict and to make any headway toward peace.  

First, this course has deepened my understanding that religions have the potential for peace and violence at the same time.  Many of the same tenants that make a religion peaceful can also result in violence and these violent actors are not always radicals.  I have always known that all religions have peaceful beliefs at some level, but I previously believed that it was only the radicals that committed the violence as part of religion.  Now, as I look at conflicts in the news or hear about religion from my friends, I can read and discuss knowing that religion at its core has the capacity for both peace and violence.  This understanding can help me to analyze motivations and see why certain groups are not on good terms.

Second, the three papers for this course have allowed me to investigate a religious conflict in which religion transformed a conflict which was previously secular into a conflict with religion as a major mobilizing and driving force.  Especially the second paper forced me to analyze deep motivations for the Chechen-Russian conflict.  I knew that religious language was a powerful tool just as the antagonist from the movie “Book of Eli” (starring Denzel Washington) hoped to use the words of the Bible to control the masses in a post-apocalyptic world, but I did not know that it could transform the very nature of a conflict in the current era.  Now, I will be more aware of the language used concerning conflicts and curious to see how the conflict may change as a result of specific discourse.

Third and most importantly, the last portion of this class talked about peace-making and my favorite criticism of modern peace-makers is that they are not speaking the correct language.  Not language as one thinks of English, Spanish, or French, but language as in the motivations and deeper reasons behind a conflict.  For instance, if a religious conflict occurs and peacemakers use economic and/or political language, it is no surprise that negotiations did not go very well.  This applies directly to my life in that now I know to be very intentional with the language I use when entering or mediating a conflict.  Understanding the conflict and being able to use language to reflect that understanding is crucial in order to make progress in negotiations.