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Journal of Religion and Violence

Volume 5, Issue 3, 2017
Religion and Struggle

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1. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 5 > Issue: 3
Margo Kitts Orcid-ID

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2. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 5 > Issue: 3
Benjamin J. Lappenga

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In 1 Timothy 1:13, the author frames Paul’s former life in Judaism as that of a “blasphemer, persecutor, and man of violence,” but then proceeds to urge Timothy to “fight the good fight” (1:18) by following Paul’s example of turning opponents over to Satan “so that they may learn not to blaspheme” (1:20). Although this discourse is regularly perceived as promoting nonviolence, this paper traces the legacies of violence in which the passage has participated. First, it considers the letter’s first audiences, for whom the charge of blasphemy appears as one of a larger set of cultural stereotypes the author uses to bolster prejudice against the rivals. Second, it situates this discourse about blasphemy within the (false) portrayal of Paul vis-à-vis Judaism that was perpetuated during the struggles between the church and the synagogue in the early centuries of the common era. Third, the paper briefly traces the ways that Christian rhetoric against Jews as blasphemers participated in acts of violence against Jews from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century. The paper concludes with a constructive critique of some readings of Pauline texts today, even those that overtly set out to understand these texts in a nonviolent manner.
3. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 5 > Issue: 3
James Petitfils

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In conversation with recent scholarship on Roman physiognomy, dress, and imperial prose fictions, this article traces the way in which ancient Christian martyr texts participate in broader Roman discourses of appearance and status in their construction of the Christian and the non-believing, apostate, or blaspheming other. After introducing the nexus between appearance, status, and identity in Roman society and culture more generally, this article considers the way in which these physiognomic and sartorial conventions function in two imperial prose fictions—Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe and Apuleius’s Metamorphoses—before turning to a similar consideration of two Christian martyr texts, namely, the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity and the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons. The article contends that the martyr texts, like the imperial fictions, construct the other, in part by appealing to long-standing Roman physiognomic and sartorial expectations. The non-believers, apostates, and blasphemers are visibly conspicuous for their non-elite deportment and slave-like physical features—features which, in a Roman context, mark their bodies as legitimate objects of violence. The Christians, in contrast, showcase a posture befitting the elite (those safeguarded from licit violence), not that of slaves or low-status damnati/noxii (those condemned to violent death in the Roman arena). In so doing, these martyr texts literarily reimagine Roman social strategies of violent humiliation as celebrations of honorable Christian identity, while they simultaneously deploy characteristically Roman discursive strategies to construct a humiliated, blaspheming other.
4. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 5 > Issue: 3
Abby Kulisz

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This paper explores the ways communities reexperience traumatic events. Previous studies have made important contributions by observing that communities, in contrast to individuals, often use a traumatic event to construct their identity; and trauma is not always painful but sometimes desired. To further investigate these dimensions of traumatization, I focus on the performance of mātam or self-flagellation, which is practiced by a small minority of the world’s Shīʿī Muslim population on the Day of ʿĀshūrāʾ. For many Shīʿa, particularly Twelvers, Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī’s death at the battle of Karbala in 680 C.E. is a collectively traumatic event. Not only does Karbala embody a collective tragedy for Shīʿī Muslims, it defines and shapes their interpretation of history. During the practice of mātam, the mourner enacts the trauma of Karbala on one’s body, thus reliving and preserving the collective trauma.
5. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 5 > Issue: 3
Marte Nilsen, Shintaro Hara

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The collective term “jihadist conflict” is used widely in academia, policy, and the media to describe a range of different political and religious conflicts. While all these conflicts are fought by Muslim groups who in one way or another regard their struggle as a jihad, the goals, motivation, and interpretation of jihad differ significantly from one conflict to another. The branding of movements as jihadist is driven by analysts, governments, and the media on the one hand, and by violent extremist groups with a transnational agenda on the other. While this branding is often embraced by those who pursue violent means, be they militant groups engaged in intrastate conflicts or disenfranchised individuals carrying out terrorist acts, the brand itself does not help us understand the fundamental conflict dynamics. Using the example of the Patani conflict in southern Thailand, this article illuminates how a political conflict may be misinterpreted if the religious motivation of militants is generalized rather than analyzed in its own terms.

book reviews

6. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 5 > Issue: 3
Gail Streete

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7. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 5 > Issue: 3
Susan B. Ridgely

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8. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 5 > Issue: 3
Michael D. Bailey

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9. Journal of Religion and Violence: Volume > 5 > Issue: 3
Asbjørn Dyrendal

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