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Project Description

In recent decades, the relationship between "violence" and "religion" in contemporary social and political life has increasingly become a pressing subject of public discourse. The intensification of interest in the causes of "religious violence" has stimulated research into the ways that people operating within the horizons of one religious tradition or another have historically derived—and continue to derive—prescriptions for and models of "legitimate" violence from authoritative texts, practices, and institutions. Yet, uncritical dependence on contemporary Western conceptions of such categories as "the political," "the religious," "the ethical," or "the juridical" has too often obscured rather than illuminated the diversity and particularity of historical phenomena—both past and present—that might be classed under the rubric "religious violence."

This project aims to contribute to a better understanding of the genealogy of "religious violence" by exploring, within a comparative framework, the diverse discourses and practices of violence that operated across the full range of ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities throughout the Graeco-Roman world from the early Roman period until the rise of Islam (circa 150 B.C.E. to 750 C.E.). Indeed, we would propose that our notion of religious violence is inextricably linked to the specific histories of inter-communal competition and, at times, outright antagonism in this formative period, which saw the rise and consolidation of the Roman and Sasanian Empires, the gradual eclipse of traditional Graeco-Roman religions, and the emergence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in their various principal forms.

The project will focus on the political and social contexts, textual traditions, rhetorical forms, modes of representation, and ritual idioms and practices that shaped ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern conceptions of the nexus between "religion" and "violence," with special attention to the Jewish, Roman, Roman-Christian, Persian, and early Islamic cultural spheres. Contributors are especially encouraged to consider the social horizons of these discourses and practices of "sanctified violence." What were the social, political, or ideological aims and effects of such discourses and practices? How are discursive and ritual forms of "sanctified violence" related to community-formation and maintenance?

Topics this project hopes to address:

• The categories "sanctified" and "religious" violence: their uses and limitations
• Justifications of violence and authoritative textual tradition
• Justifications of violence and the rhetorics of sacrifice and sacralization
• Language and/as deed: the rhetoric of violence and violent action
• The relationship in pre-Christian Roman culture among (1) political hegemony, (2) philosophical attitudes toward violence, and (3) cultic or mythic violence (e.g., gladiatorial games)
• The ideological underpinnings of Roman, Roman-Christian, Sassanian, and Islamic imperialism
• discourses of violence among the (relatively) disempowered or the colonized (e.g., slaves, women, Jews, Christians, etc.)
• Gender and the body in discourses of religious violence
• Apocalyptic literature and religious violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
• Discourses of martyrdom: violence toward the self, violence toward the other
• "Licit" and "illicit" violence

Project Components

Graduate Seminar

First, it will include a graduate seminar led by Professor Calvin Roetzel in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota during spring semester 2007. The seminar will consider different methodological strategies that may assist in the understanding of the discourses of violence. In conjunction with these theoretical and methodological considerations, the seminar will focus specifically on the histories of Roman "religions," early Judaism, and early Christianity. It will consider select texts, material artifacts, practices, social movements, or events that shaped the experience of each of these groups and their discourses of violence. Of special interest will be the rhetoric of violence in the New Testament against its Jewish, biblical, and Graeco-Roman background, and the shifting relationship between religion and violence with the gradual Christianization of the Roman Empire during Late Antiquity. Readings of works of four or five internationally known scholars working on the topic will be linked to visits of these scholars to campus to participate in the discussion. These scholars will return a second time for the conference in the fall.

Conference

This first phase of this project will be followed by an (inter)national conference on this topic, to be held at the University of Minnesota the following fall, 6-8 October 2007. The conference will be open to the public; in a addition, a major public address on the topic of "religion" and "violence" will be held on the Saturday night of the conference (October 6). The conference will bring to campus the previously invited scholars as well as others to present papers and to engage in active dialogue on the topic before us. University academics from a wide range of departments with an interest in this topic will be asked to respond to papers and participate in the public discussion. In addition, it is hoped that a small number of graduate student papers will be of sufficiently high quality to be included in the proceedings. It is our aim to publish an edited volume based on the papers and responses delivered at the conference (though perhaps supplemented with additional invited contributions), which will reach not only a scholarly audience but also a wider public.