{"id":438,"date":"2012-03-01T12:00:42","date_gmt":"2012-03-01T12:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/practicalmattersjournal.ecdsdev.org\/?p=438"},"modified":"2015-09-01T16:06:16","modified_gmt":"2015-09-01T20:06:16","slug":"teaching-overcoming-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/2012\/03\/01\/teaching-overcoming-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching ‘Overcoming Violence’: Reflections on Violence, Peace, and Practical Theology"},"content":{"rendered":"
Download PDF:\u00a0Teaching Overcoming Violence<\/a><\/h5>\n
\n
<\/h5>\n

Editor’s Note<\/em><\/strong>: The following reflection is based on the authors’ experiences teaching a collaborative course entitled, “Overcoming Violence”. The syllabus and supplemental materials for this course can be downloaded\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

The Decline of Violence?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

By the recent account of Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker, a course on \u201cOvercoming Violence\u201d may be unnecessary\u2014or at best purely historical. In his latest book,\u00a0The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined<\/u><\/em>,1<\/u><\/sup>Pinker argues that violence has been on the decline for several millennia and that we are living today in the least violent \u00e9poque of human existence. In a recent opinion article in the\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>, provocatively titled \u201cWhy War Is Going Out of Style,\u201d2<\/u><\/sup>Pinker and co-author Joshua S. Goldstein, an emeritus professor of international relations at American University, argue that \u201cwar no longer pays\u201d and that there is a \u201cgrowing repugnance toward institutional violence.\u201d They cite statistical analyses over time that have indicated a decline in the numbers of both full-scale wars (defined as resulting in a thousand or more deaths) and of smaller civil wars and conflicts that result in a lower death toll. \u201cTrue,\u201d Pinker and Goldstein concede, \u201cwe still harbor demons like greed, dominance, revenge and self-deception. But we also have faculties that inhibit them, like self-control, empathy, reason and a sense of fairness. We will always have the capacity to kill one another in large numbers, but with effort we can safeguard the norms and institutions that have made war increasingly repugnant.\u201d<\/p>\n

Against the panoply of violent acts that humans commit, Pinker\u00a0suggests<\/u>\u00a0that the better question is not why we do these things, but rather \u201cWhat is it in our nature that allows us to refrain from all of these things?\u201d3<\/u><\/sup>\u00a0Pinker\u2019s proposal has been controversial. A Harvard colleague, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, a longtime researcher of violence and mass atrocity, has\u00a0rebutted<\/u>\u00a0Pinker\u2019s \u201cdecline of violence\u201d argument, arguing that such violent events as Auschwitz and Hiroshima have been \u201cdefining events\u201d in the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. Lifton finds in Pinker\u2019s thesis a \u201cterrible paradox,\u201d in that while \u201cfor most people alive today, life is less violent than it has been in previous centuries, it is also the case that never have human beings been in as much danger of destroying ourselves collectively, of endangering the future of our species.\u201d4<\/u><\/sup><\/p>\n

Lifton shares something of Pinker\u2019s optimism about our capacity to refrain from violence\u2014but not without an active effort toward nonviolence. In this regard, Lifton observes, \u201cWe are not helpless about our fate. There could not be a more crucial moment to draw upon our gradual taming of individual violence, along with our growing awareness of the grotesque consequences of numbed technological violence, to achieve lasting forms of what can be called peace.\u201d In the current context of ongoing violence, however much reduced from past eras, Lifton\u2019s suggestion is that the reduction of violence requires us to seek diligently and deliberately those \u201cbetter angels of our nature\u201d in an immediate and ongoing way\u2014and, importantly, to pay attention to violence in its individual and interpersonal, as well as institutional and structural forms. In that sense, the need to overcome violence\u2014and the rationale for teaching about violence, nonviolence, war, and peace\u2014could not be more necessary, or more relevant.5<\/u><\/sup><\/p>\n

Practical Theology and Conflict Transformation<\/strong><\/h3>\n

It was out of this set of concerns that we devised and taught the course \u201cOvercoming Violence: Practical Theology and Conflict Resolution\u201d at Harvard Divinity School in the Spring of 2007. We are honored that the syllabus has been selected for publication in this issue of\u00a0Practical Matters<\/em>. The course was an initiative of the\u00a0Boston Theological Institute<\/u>\u00a0(BTI) and conceived and team-taught by the authors along with\u00a0Ed Rodman<\/u>\u00a0of the Episcopal Divinity School,\u00a0Samuel Johnson<\/u>\u00a0of the Boston University School of Theology, and\u00a0Ann Riggs<\/u>\u00a0of the National Council of Churches. The immediate rationale for the course was to instantiate into the curriculum of the BTI consortium schools a course that would provide ways for students in the BTI to engage practically theologically the aims of the World Council of Churches\u2019 \u201cDecade to Overcome Violence: Churches Seeking Reconciliation and Peace, 2000-2010<\/u>.\u201d<\/p>\n

If we were to do it again, we would likely substitute the phrase \u201cconflict transformation\u201d for \u201cconflict resolution\u201d in the course\u2019s subtitle. \u201cConflict transformation\u201d has more recently become the preferred term of art and practice for its humble acknowledgment that not all conflicts can always be resolved\u2014or be resolved definitively and to the satisfaction of all parties. The Boston Theological Institute now offers a\u00a0certificate program<\/u>\u00a0in Religion and Conflict Transformation for students in its consortium seminaries. The notion of transformation suggests a sense of the process\u2014and, hopefully, the progress\u2014towards peace, while also gesturing toward the transformation of hearts and conversion at the level of the spirit and soul that must take place for lasting peace to take hold. This insight is captured in Tom Massaro\u2019s key summary of what he learned in teaching the course\u2014namely, that \u201cpeace is more than the mere absence of war.\u201d6<\/u><\/sup>\u00a0As Massaro further observes, \u201cThe call to Christians, and to all people of good will, is to disarm our hearts and to contribute to the establishment of peace through all aspects of our lives, including our spirituality and our ordinary habitual practices.\u201d7<\/u><\/sup><\/p>\n

Subtitle aside, many of the themes and contours of our course would likely remain the same, with updates to reflect current events and concerns. The first set of concerns that we addressed in the course had to do with the\u00a0biological, psychological, and sociological<\/em>\u00a0sources of violence. This interdisciplinary background material exposed themes that we returned to time and time again with our students in the course, and the literature in the area has continued to evolve.8<\/u><\/sup>\u00a0The biopsychosocial materials provided a necessary background for our inquiry into the roots of violence, for as Massaro aptly observes, \u201cNobody simply wakes up one morning and decides spontaneously to use deadly force. Hitlers, Pol Pots and bin Ladens are long in the making. Those who embark on violent courses of action most often reflect complex webs of influences, including warped patterns of gender relations, racial and ethnic subtexts, ideologies of hatred and histories of the tragic demonization of \u2018othered\u2019 groups.\u201d9<\/u><\/sup><\/p>\n

From the science and social science of violence, the subject matter moved quickly into\u00a0theological<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0philosophical<\/em>\u00a0perspectives, with particular attention to the ongoing relevance of Rene Girard\u2019s concepts of desire, mimesis, and scapegoating in a splendid guest lecture by Robert Daly, S.J., of Boston College, another BTI consortium school. If Girard\u2019s\u00a0Violence and the Sacred<\/em>\u00a0stands as a stark analysis of the violence at the heart of the Christian tradition, and certainly other religions as well, then Robert Cover\u2019s essay \u201cViolence and the Word\u201d is an equally seminal, though less well-known, testimony to the capacity for violence at the heart of law. Law and religion are institutions that have historically done violence, but have also promoted peace and reconciliation. At their intersection, the course also examined new theories and practices of\u00a0restorative justice<\/u>\u00a0in law and religion, as an evolution away from retributive forms of justice that have characterized both law and religion in eras past. The notion of restorative justice has also recently transformed the fields of international relations and conflict resolution, where\u00a0truth and reconciliation commissions<\/u>, local customs of mediation and dispute resolution (both cultural and religious), and other forms of transformative mediation and conflict transformation have sprung up to achieve the\u00a0jus post bellum<\/em>\u00a0about which Massaro has written.10<\/u><\/sup>\u00a0Restorative justice, reconciliation, and forgiveness have become important requisites of the \u201cAge of Apology\u201d11<\/u><\/sup>\u00a0that began to emerge in the twilight of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

From these institutional manifestations of violence and nonviolence, the course shifted toward particular individuals as models of nonviolence. Mahatma Gandhi and Howard Thurman emerged as key early twentieth-century avatars of nonviolence, mostly through the powerful resources assembled by authors Peter Ackerman and Jack Du Vall in their chronicle of the rise of the twentieth-century nonviolence movement in the book and accompanying documentary film\u00a0A Force More Powerful<\/u><\/em>\u2014the latter of which was the catalyst for the multimedia component of our course. Ackerman and Du Vall begin their account with the rise of Gandhi\u2019s nonviolence movement.\u00a0Howard Thurman<\/u>, the noted theologian, civil rights leader, and first black dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University, a BTI consortium member school, was an obvious addition. Thurman paid a visit to Gandhi during which Gandhi asked him to bring practices of nonviolence back to America. Thurman was also a teacher and mentor to\u00a0Martin Luther King, Jr.<\/u>, another distinguished graduate of Boston University, who paid a visit to Gandhi\u2019s birthplace in 1959, in a trip that was deeply influential in King\u2019s own development of the theology and practice of nonviolence. Borrowing a theme from the acclaimed Spike Lee film,\u00a0Do the Right Thing<\/u><\/em>, which was part of the course\u2019s accompanying film series, we put King in dialogue with Malcolm X in their contrasting views of nonviolence.<\/p>\n

From the neat line from Gandhi to Thurman and King, we moved to examine the lives and work of recent Nobel Peace Prize recipients for what they reveal about the new terrain of peace and nonviolence. In this connection, we read from the autobiographies of the Muslim Bangladeshi economist\u00a0Muhammad Yunus<\/u>, who won the Nobel Peace Prize (notably the Peace Prize, not the Economics Prize) in 2006, along with the Grameen banks that he established for their development of microcredit practices that enabled many Bangladeshis\u2014particularly women\u2014to rise from poverty in the decades after civil war, famine, and floods. The late\u00a0Wangari Maathai<\/u>, a Kenyan environmental activist, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, for her \u201ccontribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace,\u201d in the words of the Nobel Committee, becoming the first environmentalist to win the prize. Even earlier, in 1992, indigenous rights activist\u00a0Rigoberta Menchu<\/u>\u00a0of Guatemala won the Nobel Peace Prize for her promotion of the cultural rights of indigenous peoples in the context of Guatemala\u2019s nearly four decade-long civil war, thereby bringing indigenous and cultural rights into the list of requisites for peace. The autobiographies of these Nobel Peace laureates raised important connections between gender and peace, (and the legacy of Mathaai and Menchu was felt in the awarding of the prize to\u00a0three women<\/u>\u00a0in 2011 \u201cfor their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women\u2019s rights to full participation in peace-building work\u201d). Further, the autobiographies highlighted the evolving and broadening definition of peace as entailing freedom from economic, environmental, and cultural violence.<\/p>\n

From considering various models of peace and nonviolence, the course moved to consideration of various issues and types of violence. These included\u00a0personal and domestic violence<\/em>, including\u00a0suicide<\/u>\u00a0and various forms of\u00a0sexual violence<\/u>;\u00a0health and environment<\/em>, including violence as a\u00a0global health<\/u>\u00a0issue and the violence of\u00a0environmental degradation<\/u>\u00a0and\u00a0economic injustice<\/u>;ethnic and racial violence<\/em>, including the connections between\u00a0race, ethnicity, and identity<\/u>; and\u00a0war and terrorism<\/em>, including related issues of\u00a0just peacemaking<\/u>\u00a0and\u00a0humanitarian relief<\/u>. In the final unit of the course, we focused particularly on connections between religion, identity, and violence at the personal, interpersonal, and intergroup levels. At the course\u2019s end, we framed the problem ofidentity and violence<\/em>\u00a0as located in the gap between the option for an identity based on retributive\u00a0memory<\/u>\u00a0of the past, on the one hand, or a reconciliatory, hopeful, and future-oriented option of\u00a0forgiveness<\/u>, on the other.<\/p>\n

Intrusions of Art and Life:\u00a0Ghosts of Abu Ghraib<\/em>\u00a0and the Virginia Tech Massacre<\/strong><\/h3>\n

These problems of identity and violence\u2014personal, interpersonal, and communal\u2014had been contemplated from the outset as the likely culmination of the course\u2019s inquiry into violence, but our hunch in this regard was borne out by two events that occurred midway through the course. The first was the premier of the film\u00a0Ghosts of Abu Ghraib<\/em>, which documented a then still recent episode of the United States\u2019 occupation of Iraq as part of the \u201cWar on Terror,\u201d involving torture and prisoner abuse by members of the U.S. military, an event that was a turning point in public opinion on the part of many Americans, the majority of whom had supported the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003.12<\/u><\/sup>\u00a0The second was the shooting incident at Virginia Tech in which a mentally disturbed student of Korean American background, Cho Seung-Hui, murdered thirty-two members of the university community and injured twenty-five others before turning the gun on himself.<\/p>\n

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib<\/u><\/em>, directed by Rory Kennedy, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007 and was seen by a wider audience on the HBO cable network the following month. The documentary film begins with footage of the famous experiments conducted by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, beginning in 1961, into research subjects\u2019 willingness to act against their own consciences in obeying apparently authoritative orders to inflict painful shocks to actors who convincingly expressed escalating levels of agony with each elevation in voltage.13<\/u><\/sup>\u00a0The Milgram experiment footage prefaces infamous 2003 footage of the abuse of prisoners at the facility of Abu Ghraib by American military police guards during the Iraq War. The film contains extensive interviews with both the Iraqi prisoners who endured the abuse and the military police guards who enacted and documented it in graphic detail. It explores a range of theories accounting for the abuse, including the \u201cbad apples\u201d theory that the incidents were perpetrated by just a few individual soldiers gone wrong; the \u201cAnimal House<\/em>\u00a0on the night shift\u201d theory, suggestive of a broader pattern of interaction between the MPs and their prisoners; and the Milgram \u201cobedience to authority\u201d theory, with its implication that the incidents of torture at Abu Ghraib were the result of military policies and government directives that condoned and perhaps even specifically commanded that torture take place.<\/p>\n

The interviews with the individual military police guards locate culpability at both the individual and institutional levels. The individual guards admit a certain amount of guilt, but not always full responsibility. In an opening comment, one of the military personnel at Abu Ghraib states, \u201cThat place turned me into a monster. I was angry. … This being Abu Ghraib, you knew it could change your whole mind frame. If you go to Abu Ghraib for a few … if you\u2019ve been in Iraq for a while, you become a robot.\u201d The sense that place and the context made them into someone else is an overarching theme in many of the accounts. However, later on in the film, another military guard observes, \u201cIt just blew my mind how it was\u00a0normal<\/em>, you know, that it was just no big deal. It was just like another day at work. … And I am just sitting there saying to myself, \u2018My God, what is happening to this place?\u2019\u201d As one of the guards puts it toward the film\u2019s end, \u201cThat animalistic, that dark element in each of us is just brought out. It\u2019s just a matter of, you know, are the elements right?\u201d The question of whether the incident was normal or aberrational is never really resolved, but it haunts the film and occupied quite a bit of time in our class discussions.<\/p>\n

Those discussions probed the relationship between individual and collective responsibility for Abu Ghraib, eventually turning to the questions of whether the Abu Ghraib incident reflected larger cultural patterns of violence in America and how the incidents have affected the United States\u2019 standing in the world. Toward the end of the documentary, an international law expert observes, \u201cThese photographs from Abu Ghraib have come to define the United States. The U.S., which was viewed as, certainly, one of the principal advocates of human rights and the view of the dignity of human beings in the world, suddenly, is viewed as a principle expositor of torture.\u201d In a similar vein, a naval general counsel laments, \u201cThe United States used to be the model, but it is no longer. If you adopt cruel treatment … if we embrace torture … we blur the distinction between ourselves and the terrorists.\u201d In addition to this problem of distinctions, there is also the problem of popular disengagement. In a time of war on two fronts from which the American public has been largely disengaged, retired army colonel and military historian Andrew Bacevich has been a vocal proponent of the idea that the military both represents and is a reflection of America.14<\/u><\/sup>\u00a0This sort of \u201cviolence by proxy\u201d\u2014or \u201crepresentative violence\u201d\u2014must also be taken into account when it comes to understanding collective responsibility for violence. The incidents so carefully documented in\u00a0Ghosts of Abu Ghraib<\/em>\u00a0offered the class the opportunity to think not only of direct violence, but also of the \u201crepresentative violence\u201d that is done in our name at the national and international levels.<\/p>\n

The Virginia Tech shootings were another opportunity to reflect on violence and representation. Midway through our course, on April 16, 2007, university student Cho Seung-Hui15<\/u><\/sup>\u00a0embarked on a shooting rampage on the Virginia Tech campus that remains the deadliest shooting by a single gunman in U.S. history and the largest mass killing to ever take place on a university campus. As with the events of Abu Ghraib, there was a visual dimension to the crime. After shooting two students on campus in the early morning of April 16, Cho took a break, stopping by a local post office to mail a videotaped manifesto to the New York headquarters of the NBC news network, before returning to campus to continue the shooting. While the sheer number of complaints in Cho\u2019s manifesto and the variety of ways in which his mental state had displayed itself in the years, weeks, and days leading up to the shooting make it difficult to attribute his state of mind to any one set of factors, it has been argued that there was a significant religious component to his anger.16<\/u><\/sup>\u00a0The videotaped manifesto was mailed under the name \u201cA. Ishmael,\u201d which some interpreted as reference (through the opening line of Herman Melville\u2019s novel\u00a0Moby-Dick<\/em>, in which the narrator invites readers to \u201cCall me Ishmael\u201d) to the biblical story of Ishmael as the cast-out and abandoned son of Abraham. The manifesto also included rants against Christians that Cho may have intended as a rebellion against the Christian faith in which he was raised by his reportedly devout parents. At the same time, at one point Cho appropriated the Christian narrative of sacrifice in asserting, \u201cThanks to you I died like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and defenseless people.\u201d The fact that Cho was born in South Korea and moved to America with his parents at the age of eight also raised questions about whether Cho had suffered hostility or discrimination as a result of his status as a member of an immigrant, ethnic minority.17<\/u><\/sup><\/p>\n

In addition to these possible religious and ethnic motivations for Cho\u2019s violence, attention also centered, largely retrospectively, on what were apparently fairly early signs of mental illness in Cho, beginning in his childhood in Korea. These manifestations included extreme shyness, selective mutism, social anxiety, and other behaviors which some psychological experts later identified as possible precursors of schizophrenia. At Virginia Tech, he had been removed by one professor from a class for \u201cmenacing\u201d behavior. Having switched his major from business information technology to English by the time of his senior year, when he executed the attack, Cho had alarmed his English professors with violent writings and threatening behavior in class, which resulted in his being removed from one class and urged by several professors to seek counseling, including one professor who agreed to tutor Cho one-on-one before becoming too concerned about her safety to continue.18<\/u><\/sup>\u00a0Roommates and several classmates reported additional disturbing behavior, and Cho came to the attention of campus authorities for stalking three women on campus. Though Cho was deemed a danger to himself by a community health service and a judge, he received little mental health treatment and was never given an official diagnosis.<\/p>\n

In scheduled class discussion sections in the days after the shooting, students in our course opted to preempt previously scheduled topics with discussion of the connections between the Virginia Tech shootings and the subject matter of the course. For students who had experienced violence of various sorts, the Virginia Tech shooting raised painful memories and emotions. There is a presumption of safety that still attends many campuses of educational institutions, even in the aftermath of the high school shootings\u2014of which Columbine is the most notorious19<\/u><\/sup>\u2014that raised concerns about campus safety for nearly a decade prior to Virginia Tech shootings. For many of our students, the idea of such a violent event taking place within the boundaries of a university community was itself a shock. For many, the Virginia Tech shooting seemed to represent a traumatic capstone to a decade that began with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and had at its midpoint the chaos after Hurricane Katrina that devolved into violence and disorder, in addition to such international incidents as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the ongoing conflicts in Sudan, the Congo, and other locales. The Virginia Tech shootings, set within the context of these other forms and manifestations of violence, suggested an order of magnitude and loss described most aptly in the words of then-Mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, who, when asked to quantify the loss on 9\/11, in a way that seem emblematic of the decade as a whole, replied that it was \u201cMore than we can bear.\u201d<\/p>\n

The premier of\u00a0Ghosts of Abu Ghraib<\/em>\u00a0and the Virginia Tech shootings were unanticipated interludes in our \u201cOvercoming Violence\u201d course, but they were nonetheless important testaments to the relevance of the subject matter, as well as opportunities for reflection. They illustrated the important connections between individual and institutional violence. They illustrated how violence is universal in its reach, but also deeply personal and cultural in its manifestation. The\u00a0National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States<\/u>\u00a0(the \u201c9\/11 Commission\u201d) described the inability of the United States government to anticipate the events of September 11 as a \u201cfailure of imagination.\u201d20<\/u><\/sup>\u00a0Events such as Abu Ghraib and Virginia Tech, in their power to shock, also prompt us to \u201cimagine better\u201d both our own capacity for violence and the variety of forms that violence can take.<\/p>\n

A Thousand Words: A Multimedia Pedagogy of Nonviolence<\/strong><\/h3>\n

From the pictures that exposed the incidents at Abu Ghraib, to the chilling images contained in the videotaped manifesto of the Virginia Tech shooter, from the Internet feeds of masked terrorists beheading their captives, to social disorder in the aftermaths of natural disaster broadcast over the evening news, the visual dimension of violence and devastation has already come to dominate these early decades of the twenty-first century. If, as the saying goes, \u201ca picture is worth a thousand words,\u201d the pictures must be part of pedagogy, as well. With this in mind, we designed the course with a multimedia component in the form of a Thursday night film series to accompany the course.<\/p>\n

A number of the film selections were documentaries that directly complemented material on the syllabus. Among these were\u00a0A Force More Powerful<\/u><\/em>, a documentary of the twentieth-century nonviolence movement which was our lead-in to material on Gandhi and other models of nonviolence and peace.\u00a0Bonhoeffer<\/u><\/em>, director Martin Doblmeier\u2019s powerful documentary of the life and thought of the German Protestant theologian and Nazi resister, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was also on our list, and the film\u2019s website is exemplary in its range of resources and as a model of multimedia pedagogy. Another biographical film that was produced but not yet widely available at the time that we planned the course, or it would surely have been included, is director Claudia Larson\u2019s documentary of the life and work of Catholic peace and social activist Dorothy Day. The film, titled\u00a0Dorothy Day: Don\u2019t Call Me a Saint<\/u><\/em>, takes its subtitle from one of Day\u2019s wry remarks about the public reception of her work, to wit, \u201cDon\u2019t call me a saint, I don\u2019t want to be dismissed so easily.\u201d<\/p>\n

Three more films addressed topics of restorative justice, racial reconciliation, and environmental violence. The first of these,\u00a0A Justice that Heals<\/u><\/em>, featured the story of a remarkable process of reconciliation initiated by a local Catholic priest and members of his congregation. A young Latino man, whose parents attended the church, murdered another young man, who was from a white family who had drifted away from the Church. Through a remarkable program of prison visitation, the congregation, later joined by the victim\u2019s mother, was able to achieve a reconciliation\u2014across language, culture, and grief\u2014between the families of the murderer and his victim. At the film\u2019s climax, illustrating the paradoxical way in which violence both divides and connects, the victim\u2019s mother says to her son\u2019s murderer, \u201cYou\u2019re a member of this family, whether you wanted to be or not, you are. You\u2019re like my own son.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the cusp of its twentieth anniversary, Spike Lee\u2019s\u00a0Do the Right Thing<\/em>\u00a0addressed the ongoing need for racial reconciliation in its depiction of a hot day that culminates in inflammatory remarks and an explosion of pent-up hostility in New York\u2019s Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood. The character Radio Raheem\u2019s brass knuckle rings forming the words \u201cLove\u201d and \u201cHate\u201d illustrate the starkness of the choices. A lesser known documentary film,\u00a0Green<\/u><\/em>, filmed by director Laura Dunn in and around the chemical processing plants located in Louisiana\u2019s notorious \u201cCancer Alley\u201d along the Mississippi River, depicted problems of environmental racism and economic injustice. The lush greenery of the swampland contrasts with more unnatural greens of the chemicals in the chemical plants\u2019 waste ponds, and the title is also suggestive of the green color of money involved in the selling out of poor neighborhoods to big industry.<\/p>\n

Some of our film selections were still in production and could only be shown in fragments. These included director Katrina Browne\u2019s important and largely autobiographical film detailing the complicity of her colonial ancestors, the de Wolf family of Rhode Island, in the slave trade.\u00a0Traces of the Trade<\/u><\/em>\u00a0features an important \u201cfamily reunion\u201d in which Browne and other family members visit slave trading sites in Africa and the Caribbean that were the basis of the family business. The deep connections between the de Wolf family and the Episcopal Church also suggest the institutional complicity of the church in the trade. Harvard Divinity School student Valarie Kaur\u2019s documentary of the Sikh American experience of 9\/11,\u00a0Divided We Fall<\/u><\/em>, was also in the final stages of production. The film chronicles the rapidity by which Americans, fearful and shocked in the aftermath of the attacks, began to equate difference with danger and \u201cturbans with terror\u201d and explores the common values that can unite us as a religiously and culturally pluralistic society.<\/p>\n

Nonviolence as a Continuing Challenge for Practical Theology<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The course concluded with reflections on memory, identity, and forgiveness as central themes for understanding and coping with violence. In truth, it was difficult to know how, precisely, to end a course as wide-ranging and comprehensive as \u201cOvercoming Violence.\u201d As Petersen observed at the course\u2019s end,<\/p>\n

There is a need to move beyond a survey of violence to models for reconciliation and peace building. This necessitates analysis of what a just peace is and what this means in terms of human rights and a \u201crestorative\u201d or \u201ctransformative\u201d justice. There is a need for an articulated spirituality of non-violence appropriate to our times, perhaps even an order of persons committed to non-violence such as in the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Peace building cannot happen apart from a climate of truth-telling as a means toward forgiveness and reconciliation. In all of this, churches, as well as individuals, must be more proactive in finding ways to serve as \u2018ambassadors\u2019 of peace (II Cor 5:19-20).21<\/u><\/sup><\/p>\n

In that connection, it is worth highlighting an initiative that a group of students in the course took up as a special initiative and final project. This was the drafting of a \u201cJustPeace Declaration\u201d to be submitted to the World Council of Churches as an outcome document of the course. The product of meetings that took place throughout the course, the students stated their goal in the following manner: \u201cWe advocate the\u00a0imagining and subsequent creation of a deep peace<\/em>, a peace wherein the mind, body, and spirit are recognized as inextricably linked in terms of the individual, community, and nation. The\u00a0transformative catalyst<\/em>\u00a0towards this imagined pacific landscape is located within the\u00a0space between the victim and victimizer<\/em>.\u201d22<\/u><\/sup>\u00a0Drawing on central course themes of memory, identity, and truth, they maintained:<\/p>\n

Central to our conceptualization of\u00a0transformative space<\/em>\u00a0is an awareness of the way in which we envision and define our community in relation to our own\u00a0past, present, and future<\/em>. Deep peace requires constant, truthful, transparent, and public reflection upon the victim\/victimizer cycle and the ways in which our community has both failed and succeeded in breaking this pattern. … To become fully human is to live in the present with a\u00a0truthful knowledge of the past<\/em>, to be aware of the ways in which the\u00a0present is itself a process<\/em>, and to understand that in every process there is opportunity for\u00a0justice, redemption, and progress<\/em>. In this capacity, we recognize that our ‘future’ is defined by our courage to become fully human in the present and our willingness to act with\u00a0courage and humility<\/em>.<\/p>\n

With a central focus on North Korea, then as now a place desperately in need of peace and reconciliation,23<\/u><\/sup>\u00a0the students advocated a community approach to peace at both the local and global levels, calling for greater participation by faith communities in Track Two diplomacy alongside national governments and international bodies.24<\/u><\/sup>\u00a0The \u201cJustPeace Declaration\u201d makes a number of more specific recommendations for achieving peace at the local and international levels with respect to the continuing isolation of North Korea from the community of nations and communities of faith. The concluding recommendation gets to the heart of the continuing need to construct and enact practical theologies of nonviolence and peace, namely through the creation and promotion of institutions \u201cto train people of faith for grassroots activism and place them in situations to help mediate conflict.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the end, to return to the argument with which these reflections began, the students in the \u201cOvercoming Violence\u201d course seemed more inclined to side with Lifton than with Pinker. Even if violence can be documented to be on the historical decline, the manifestations of violence in our deeply connected world are often more vivid and more widely known. Our knowledge of violence and its many causes and effects presents us with choices and options for nonviolent agency. Today \u201cambassadors of peace\u201d require both an understanding of the nature of violence and a practical theology of peace to overcome it. It is to this end that we hope our course will be an ongoing contribution and an aid in the development of additional practical pedagogies of peace.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2217 M. Christian Green would like to express her gratitude to the outgoing dean of Harvard Divinity School, William A. Graham (2002-2012), for his support of this course and other practical theological endeavors at HDS.<\/p>\n

Photograph by Kevin Dooley.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Notes<\/h4>\n
    \n
  1. <\/u>Steven Pinker,\u00a0The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined<\/em>(New York: Viking, 2011).<\/li>\n
  2. <\/u>Joshua S. Goldstein and Steven Pinker, \u201cWar Is Really Going Out of Style<\/u>,\u201d\u00a0The New York Times,<\/em>December 17, 2011.<\/li>\n
  3. <\/u>Carl Zimmer, \u201cProfiles in Science\u2014Steven Pinker\u2014Human Nature\u2019s Pathologist,\u201d video interview,\u00a0The New York Times,<\/em>November 29, 2011,http:\/\/video.nytimes.com\/video\/2011\/11\/28\/science\/100000001194711\/steven-pinker.html?emc=eta1<\/u>\u00a0(accessed April 9, 2012).<\/li>\n
  4. <\/u>Robert Jay Lifton, \u201cInvitation to Dialogue: Are We Less Violent?,\u201d letter to the editor,\u00a0The New York Times,<\/em>January 3, 2012.<\/li>\n
  5. <\/u>The literature on religion and violence, in particular, has continued to proliferate. For recent titles published since the conclusion of our course, see e.g. John D. Carlson and Jonathan H. Ebel, eds.,\u00a0From Jeremiad to Jihad : Religion, Violence, and America<\/em>(Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming 2012),; James R. Lewis,\u00a0Violence and New Religious Movements<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Andrew R. Murphy, ed.,\u00a0The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence<\/em>\u00a0(Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); Ulrich Beck, A God of One\u2019s Own: Religion\u2019s Capacity for Peace and the Potential for Violence<\/em>\u00a0(Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010); Jack David Eller,\u00a0Cruel Creeds, Virtuous Violence: Religious Violence Across Culture and History<\/em>(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books,\u00a0 2010); John Teehan,\u00a0In the Name of God: The Evolutionary Origins of\u00a0 Religious Ethics and Violence<\/em>\u00a0(Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Jennifer L. Jefferis,\u00a0Religion and Political Violence: Sacred Protest in the Modern World<\/em>\u00a0(London: Routledge, 2009); Kathryn McClymond,\u00a0Beyond Sacred Violence: A Comparative Study of Sacrifice<\/em>\u00a0(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2008); Lisa Isherwood and Rosemary Radford Ruether,\u00a0Weep Not for Your Children: Essays on Religion and Violence<\/em>\u00a0(London: Equinox, 2008); Bryan Rennie and Philip L. Tite,\u00a0Religion, Terror, and Violence: Religious Studies Perspectives<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Routledge, 2008); Charles Selengut:\u00a0Sacred Fury: Understanding Religion and Violence,\u00a0<\/em>2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008); and James K. Wellman, Jr.,\u00a0Belief and Bloodshed: Religion and Violence Across Time and Tradition\u00a0<\/em>(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).<\/li>\n
  6. <\/u>Thomas Massaro, S.J., \u201cA Catholic Perspective on Overcoming Violence,\u201d September 9, 2007, paper on file with the authors.<\/li>\n
  7. <\/u>Ibid.<\/li>\n
  8. <\/u>Were we to update this area of the syllabus we might well include Pinker\u2019s\u00a0The Better Angels of\u00a0 Our Nature,<\/em>along with such recent studies as Frans de Waal,\u00a0The Age of Empathy: Nature\u2019s Lessons for a Kinder Societ<\/em>y (New York: Crown, 2009); Jeremy Rifkin,\u00a0The Empathetic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Tarcher, 2009); and Michael E. McCoullough,\u00a0Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct\u00a0<\/em>(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008).<\/li>\n
  9. <\/u>Massaro, \u201cA Catholic Perspective.\u201d<\/li>\n
  10. <\/u>See Thomas Massaro, S.J., and Thomas Shannon,\u00a0Catholic Perspectives on Peace and War<\/em>(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).<\/li>\n
  11. <\/u>See especially R. L. Brooks, \u201cThe Age of Apology,\u201d in\u00a0When Sorry Isn\u2019t Enough: The Controversy Over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice,<\/em>ed. Roy L. Brooks (New York: NYU Press, 1999), 3-11. See also Mark Gibney, Rhoda E. Howard\u2013Hassmann, Jean-Marc Coicau, and Niklaus Steiner, eds.,\u00a0The Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past\u00a0<\/em>(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) and Daniel Philpott, ed.,\u00a0The Politics of Past Evil: Religion, Reconciliation, and Dilemmas of Transitional Justice<\/em>(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).<\/li>\n
  12. <\/u>Nearly 60% of the United States\u2019 population supported the invasion of Iraq, with the approval of the United Nations, in March 2003, and nearly half supported the invasion even without U.N. support. Richard Benedetto, \u201cPoll: Most Back War but Want U.N. Support,\u201d\u00a0USA Today,<\/em>March 16, 2003.<\/li>\n
  13. <\/u>The results are described in Stanley Milgram,\u00a0Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View\u00a0<\/em>(1974; repr., New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009).<\/li>\n
  14. <\/u>See Andrew Bacevich,\u00a0The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War<\/em>(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) andWashington Rules: America\u2019s Path to Permanent War<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010). The moral and political connection between Americans and military that represent them\u2014against the many forces that have tended to isolate the current all-volunteer army from American society since the Vietnam War\u2014is a pervasive theme in Bacevich\u2019s writing.<\/li>\n
  15. <\/u>It is interesting to consider whether the media\u2019s vacillation between Korean convention of placing the surname first and a more Americanize version in which the order is reversed\u2014and there was a preference in many media outlets for the former\u2014served to make Cho seem more \u201cforeign\u201d and less a product of American culture than perhaps was the case.<\/li>\n
  16. <\/u>For an important discussion of the religious significance of the Virginia Tech shootings, see Grace Kao, \u201cOf Tragedy and Its Aftermath: The Search for Religious Meaning in the Shootings at Virginia Tech,\u201d in\u00a0From Jeremiad to Jihad : Religion, Violence, and America<\/em>, ed. John D. Carlson and Jonathan H. Ebel (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming 2012).<\/li>\n
  17. <\/u>It should also be noted that Cho\u2019s Korean background was of particular interest to students in the course. Several students were themselves of Korean or Korean-American background, and, as indicated below, North Korea was selected as a case study for students who opted to participate in the group discussions that produced the \u201cJustPeace Declaration\u201d that was an outcome of the course.<\/li>\n
  18. <\/u>For the tutor\u2019s account of her interactions with Cho and the larger response to and lessons of the Virginia Tech shootings, see Lucinda Roy,\u00a0No Right to Remain Silent: The Tragedy at Virginia Tech<\/em>(New York: Harmony, 2009).<\/li>\n
  19. <\/u>For an insightful analysis of the Columbine shooting, see Dave Cullen,\u00a0Columbine<\/em>(New York: Twelve, 2010).<\/li>\n
  20. <\/u>National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States,\u00a0The 9\/11 Commission Report,<\/em>(July 22, 2004), 356.Also see\u00a0http:\/\/govinfo.library.unt.edu\/911\/report\/911Report.pdf<\/u>.<\/li>\n
  21. <\/u>See Deenabandhu Manchala, ed.,\u00a0Nurturing Peace: Theological Reflections on Overcoming Violence<\/em>(Geneva: WCC Publications, 2005).<\/li>\n
  22. <\/u>\u201cJustPeace Declaration\u2014May 2007,\u201d draft declaration written by students in the \u201cOvercoming Violence\u201d course and on file with the authors (emphases added here and below).<\/li>\n
  23. <\/u>Two of the participating students were Korean and had served in the South Korean army\u2014thus bringing valuable knowledge and experience to this component of the course.<\/li>\n
  24. <\/u>A similar approach has recently been recommended by group of prominent scholars and religious leaders through the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. See R. Scott Appleby, Richard Cizik, and Thomas Winwright, eds.\u00a0Engaging Faith Communities Abroad: A New Imperative for U.S. Foreign Policy<\/em>(Chicago: Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 2010).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Download PDF:\u00a0Teaching Overcoming Violence Editor’s Note: The following reflection is based on the authors’ experiences teaching a collaborative course entitled, “Overcoming Violence”. The syllabus and supplemental materials for this course can be downloaded\u00a0here. The Decline of Violence? By the recent<\/p>\n

    Continue Reading<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":434,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,15],"tags":[156,43,70,155,154,42],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/Terror.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":877,"href":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438\/revisions\/877"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}