I have just finished Abby Day's Believing in Belonging and Danièle Hervieu-Léger's Religion as a Chain of Memory. I am writing reviews of both for Lori Beaman. These books have me thinking... thinking...
Further Framing of Project:
Speaking the Language of Peace: Compassion, Dialogical Exchange, and Conflict Resolution
The language of religion is often adopted to express the ineffable, whether you are religious or not. This is part of the confusion of post-modernity-- institutionalized religion appears to be in decline, but the concepts of 'universal' love, compassion, charity, etc. are often framed in the tongues of religious traditions.
Religion itself is a lexicon of emotion (the ineffable) which encompasses both interpersonal/familial/societal and mystical experience. The language(s) of religion is/are a way to express shared emotional experience; in this way, having the potential to facilitate understanding, resolving conflict.
Obviously there are many sociological aspects of religion functioning in different ways (political, economic, cultural) but my study will focus on the aspect of compassion.
Compassion is hardly a specific term. Compassion has implications in traditions spanning religions worldwide. I will provide an academic geneology of compassion, likely focusing on Jainism, Buddhism, Islam and 'secular' compassion (implying that 'secular' democratic values cannot forget their Christianized roots).
Abby Day recounts a story about “Barry”, a man who explains his willingness to cheat
money from the bank but never from a small business (Day 136). (For example, 'people' in general would pause at stealing directly from a local shopkeeper, but perhaps would not object to altering a coupon for a large corporate restaurant to get a free appetizer.) This reminds me of the ‘moral decay’ inherent
to the depersonalization and dehumanization of social contact, and in essence,
of compassion. I would like to look
further at the implications of person-to-person compassion and
institutionalized (legal, secular) compassion.
The 'dialogical exchange' piece of my project is related to my work in peace education and conflict resolution. Many words in the language of religion 'trigger' negative responses in various communities. Words like prophet, chakra, saviour, soul, jihad, etc are often politically charged. Danièle Hervieu-Léger reminds us of the development of mutual suspicion between religion and academia, alienating science from the religious. The demystification and destratification of these terms is essential to building dialogue between religious communities and others, as well as resolving the disparities of competing moralities in a post-secular age.
This is an encapsulation of my work so far!
