The World's Religions After September 11
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The World’s Religions after September 11 This page intentionally left blank The World’s Religions after September 11 Volume 1 Religion, War, and Peace EDITED BY ARVIND SHARMA PRAEGER PERSPECTIVES Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The world’s religions after September 11 / edited by Arvind Sharma. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-275-99621-5 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-275-99623-9 (vol. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-275-99625-3 (vol. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-275-99627-7 (vol. 3 : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-275-99629-1 (vol. 4 : alk. paper) 1. Religions. 2. War—Religious aspects. 3. Human rights—Religious aspects. 4. Religions—Rela- tions. 5. Spirituality. I. Sharma, Arvind. BL87.W66 2009 200—dc22 2008018572 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2009 by Arvind Sharma All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008018572 ISBN: 978-0-275-99621-5 (set) 978-0-275-99623-9 (vol. 1) 978-0-275-99625-3 (vol. 2) 978-0-275-99627-7 (vol. 3) 978-0-275-99629-1 (vol. 4) First published in 2009 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10987654321 Contents Introduction vii Part I. War Chapter 1 The Violent Bear It Away: Christian Reflections on Just War 3 William R. O’Neill Chapter 2 Turning War Inside Out: New Perspectives for the Nuclear Age 13 Marcia Sichol Chapter 3 Demonic Religion and Violence 19 Lloyd Steffen Chapter 4 The BhagavadgXt7 and War: Some Early Anticipations of the Gandhian Interpretation of the BhagavadgXt7 31 Arvind Sharma Chapter 5 Just-War Theory in South Asia: Indic Success, Sri Lankan Failure? 37 Katherine K. Young Part II. Terror Chapter 6 Religion and Terror: A Post-9/11 Analysis 71 Stephen Healey VI CONTENTS Chapter 7 The Approach of Muslim Turks to Religious Terror 85 Ramazan Bicer Chapter 8 Is It Relevant to Talk about Democracy in Lebanon in the Aftermath of the Summer 2006 Conflicts? 99 Pamela Chrabieh Part III. Peace Chapter 9 9/11 and Korean American Youth: A Study of Two Opposing Forces 111 Heerak Christian Kim Chapter 10 Sacrificing the Paschal Lamb: A Road toward Peace 129 Jean Donovan Chapter 11 Seeking the Peace of the Global City of Knowledge of God after 9/11 139 Aaron Ricker Chapter 12 The Golden Rule and World Peace 153 Patricia A. Keefe Chapter 13 World Religions and World Peace: Toward a New Partnership 161 Brian D. Lepard About the Editor and Contributors 169 Index 173 Introduction Arvind Sharma Europe has arguably not known war for the past sixty years, but the world is another matter. Those who were dreaming of a utopian peace after the implosion of the Soviet Union had their dreams shattered on September 11, 2001. Violence was back with a bang and this time not in secular livery but in sacred garb. And it was back this time not as war between armed parties, but as terror in which an armed minority conducts asymmetric warfare on an unarmed civilian population, disregarding national borders. This new cocktail of violence is not as deadly as the older one yet but its elements are more combustible. This volume addresses this situation and contains a series of chapters that deal with the themes of war, terror, and peace, in that order. Part I of the volume is devoted to war, especially to those aspects of war that have become more salient after the events of September 11, 2001. The concept of just war is now being revisited in almost all the religions, and the issue is explored here in the religious context of Christianity and the regional context of South Asia. The famous Hindu text, the BhagavadgXt7, is also reprised once again in this context, and the demonic dimension of war is also explored. Although the prospect of a nuclear Armageddon may have receded somewhat after the end of the Cold War, it is still around to haunt us, and new perspectives on it are also examined. Thus the concept of just war, the complications introduced by the potential for nuclear war, and the demonic element associated with war are some of the themes explored in this part of the book. The discussion is extended from war to terror in Part II of the book. War is typically engaged in by states, which are legal entities. Thus the violence involved in war is on a different footing from the one involved in terrorism, which often involves non-state sponsors. This difference opens up a whole new dimension of VIII INTRODUCTION the issue of religion and war that is explored in this part of the book, especially in three theaters: the United States, Turkey, and Lebanon. Peace is the theme of Part III, as an antidote to both war and terror. But it is not to an innocent, but a hard-won, peace that one returns to, for peace is now more a matter of equilibrium rather than the complete absence of tension. How religion can be both sublimely and sordidly involved in maintaining or disturbing this equilibrium is analyzed in this last part. Part I War This page intentionally left blank CHAPTER 1 The Violent Bear It Away: Christian Reflections on Just War William R. O’Neill In a world riven by religious terror and casual slaughter, what shall we say of the justum bellum? Is the very notion now a contradictio in adjecto in late or post- modernity—war having finally become, in Clausewitz’s words, “theoretically lim- itless”?1 Or, as Michael Walzer urges, is war still a “rule-governed activity, a world of permissions and prohibitions—a moral world,” even “in the midst of hell”?2 The norms of just war, after all, remain a stubborn inheritance, an “overlapping consensus” of permissions and prohibitions enshrined in international positive law (i.e., the Geneva Conventions and Protocols).3 But just how are we to make sense of such a consensus? Several distinct yet overlapping methodological perspectives emerge. We might, following Grotius, assume that the just-war norms derive from the “manifest and clear” dictates of natural reason (e.g., the “secular religion” of human rights and duties).4 And yet one wonders. Can the Augustinian- Thomistic tradition so readily be trimmed of theological reference? Must an overlapping consensus of differing narrative traditions “bracket” religious belief? Or do scriptural or theological warrants rather support a “reiteratively particularist” consensus in Walzer’s words—one logically dependent upon our distinctive religious narratives?5 In this chapter, I will propose a via media between these rival schools of thought, arguing that distinctive religious attitudes and beliefs play a constitutive role in the (1) justification, (2) modality, and (3) interpretation of the justum bellum. Yet the resulting consensus, I argue, rests less on the contingent iteration of particular traditions than on the family resemblance of well-formed narratives. JUSTIFICATION Christians, after Constantine, drew on their Greco-Roman and biblical her- itage, working multiple variations on the theme of the justum bellum. Codified in the Corpus Juris Canonici, Ambrose’s and Augustine’s early speculations were later grounded in Thomistic natural law and refined by the Spanish Scholastics. Still further variations emerged in the seventeenth century, with 4 WAR the doctrine’s progressive disenchantment. In the Prolegomena of his magiste- rial De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625), Grotius writes that the precepts of natural law retain their validity “etiamsi daremus non esse Deum [even were God not to exist].”6 For Grotius, to be sure, the impious gambit “cannot be conceded”; yet for his successors, the speculative hypothesis soon became “a thesis.” For Pufendorf, Burlamaqui, and Vattel “the self-evidence of natural law” left God a supernumerary in creation.7 Under the spell of modernity’s disenchantment, Grotius’s heirs regard the validity of the just-war norms as logically independent of the ethical substance of the traditions that “hand them on” (including, a fortiori, “the broad tradition of just war in Western culture”).8 Distinctive religious attitudes and beliefs, as in the “autonomy school” of Christian ethics, serve rather a paraenetic or hortatory function, inspiring us to do what morally (rationally) we are required to do. But such beliefs do not alter the logical force of the ad bellum or in bello criteria. Consensus, in Walzer’s felicitous terms, is “thin,” or narrative-independent, as in President Bush Senior’s assertion that the Gulf War was “not a Christian war, a Muslim war, or a Jewish war, but a just war.” Yet it seems modernity’s final disenchantment is of itself.9 Not only are the norms of just war dishonored in the breach, but the rationalist foundations of the justum bellum have ceased to be perspicuous. Reason is more parsimonious than Grotius believed. Indeed, it is precisely with respect to such foundations that the putative consensus breaks down. James Childress, for instance, proposes a “prima facie duty of nonmaleficence—the duty not to harm or kill others”; the U.S. bishops argue in a similar vein in their “Peace Pastoral.”10 James Turner Johnson demurs: “the concept of a just war” begins not with a “presumption against war,” but rather with “a presumption against injustice focused on the need for responsible use of force in response to wrongdoing.”11 Such internal “différance” may well support a rival interpretation of the consen- sus, specifically, that of a merely contingent overlap of “thick” narrative traditions.12 Intercommunal agreement, that is, rests not on the “manifest and clear” precepts of natural reason, but, in Walzer’s words, on the “reiteratively particularist” conver- gence of normative practices.13 Thus Christians and Muslims may agree on the in bello norm of noncombatant immunity, but their agreement is not foreordained by natural law.