Practical Matters is excited to announce the release of its latest issue, “Violence & Peace” (Issue 5, Spring 2012). This issue brings together scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners to provide readers with a rich array of thought and practice on the question of how we may better understand the intersections between religion, violence, and peace. It features two state of the field essays, one on Religion and Violence by R. Scott Appleby, Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and another on Religion and Peacebuilding by Atalia Omer, Assistant Professor of Religion, Conflict and Peace Studies, also at the University of Notre Dame. The following is an excerpt from the issue’s editorial essay. You may read the essay in its entirety here.

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“The Crossroads of Religion, Violence, and Peace: An Introduction to Issue Five of Practical Matters“

by James W. McCarty III and Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon

We welcome you to the fifth issue of Practical Matters. This issue is dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of the ways that religion and religious practices contribute to both violence and peace. This is, in many ways, an old subject. Indeed, as both Talal Asad and now William Cavanaugh have argued, the framing of the Enlightenment project itself, whatever we would make of it, has been tied up with myths and metaphors of the violent nature of religion—which is in itself, they would argue, a dubious category.

The Wars of Religion echo in any conversation around religion and violence, at least, any conversation in Europe or North America, where this journal is geographically situated. Yet, this is also a new subject. For much of the twentieth century, many intellectuals wrote off religion as dying and irrelevant. The Arab-Israeli wars; the Iranian Revolution; the mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana; the religious and ethnic conflicts of the 1990s; and now September 11th and the once-named War on Terror have come as a shock to those who accepted the thesis of religion’s demise, which included not only academics but also foreign policy experts and military strategists. Ever since, academics, political actors, and grassroots activists have been scrambling to answer the overly broad and partly problematic question, what does religion have to do with violence and what can it contribute to peace?

You will not find a definitive answer in this issue, but you will find a series of steps that the editors of and contributors to the journal were committed to take in order to further our understanding of the intersections of religion, violence, and peace. The first step was to place this conversation in the context of religious practices and practical theology. One of the seminal works in arguing for religion as a resource in diplomacy was Religion: The Missing Dimension of Statecraft. This work included theory but also case studies of ways in which religious actors, acting out of their traditions and within religious institutions, helped bring peace to areas across the world.

We reaffirm that jumpstart to the conversation, as it is irresponsible to talk about how religion plays a role in conflicts and peacebuilding without looking at the institutions, theologies, and actors on the ground that have been both working toward peace and contributing to conflict. We also further this first framing by bringing together scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners to provide readers with a rich array of thought and practice on this question. …

Read the rest of the essay over at Practical Matters.