Reacting to a recent event on the study of religion, conflict and peace
Watching Scientific Progress in Action
read more
religion
Rubio’s civilizational appeals will backfire
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference demonstrated he is a better diplomat than Vice President J.D. Vance, although that’s not much of a hurdle to clear. Where...
Jimmy Carter’s legacy: a challenge to recognize and act on religion’s significance
US President Jimmy Carter's funeral is being held today in Washington, DC at the National Cathedral. Since he passed away shortly after Christmas, tributes have abounded about a man once derided as...
You Can Leave Your Hat On
With an avalanche of news about the government shutdown, DACA, CHIP and Stormy Daniels, the American news media did not have too much time to cover Putin’s nipples (this time around), even though it...
More religion Posts
Research Primer for Religion and IR
Michael Desch and Daniel Philpott at Notre Dame have concluded their two-year Mellon funded working group on religion and IR and published their final report titled Religion and International Relations: A Primer for Research. Desch, in his introduction (titled: "The Coming Reformation of Religion in International Affairs? The Demise of the Secularization Thesis and the Rise of New Thinking About Religion"), starts with a puzzle expressed by working group participant Timothy Shah: “religion has become one of the most influential factors in world affairs in the last generation but remains one...
What Political Science Says About Papal Elections
Given the news that Pope Benedict XVI will resign at the end of this month, the first bishop of Rome to do so since the middle of the last millennium, the college of cardinals will soon convene to elect his successor. Political scientists Forrest Maltzman, Melissa Schwartzberg, and Lee Sigelman researched how Pope John Paul II changed the papal constitution to force an outcome. As they wrote after Benedict's selection in 2005, Officially, Ratzinger's selection was attributed to the will of God ... The more immediate source of this outcome, however, was a factor about which political...
Religion in Westeros
Given that George R. R. Martin has clearly thought enough about religion in his series to both deal explicitly with these themes in the books and to create an extra feature about it for the TV show, I am supremely puzzled as to why some of the most interesting religious aspects of the book series are being left out on screen. Consider the "baptism" scene in last week's episode, in which the Priest of the Drowned God splashes seawater over a man to inculcate him into the tribe of the Iron-born to the words "what is dead may never die." If you haven't read the books, you would entirely miss...
The Last Mughal
Emperor Bahadur Shah IISource: Wikimedia CommonsThe din of the Great Rebellion of 1857 will continue to echo into our era, marred as it is by ongoing wars and insurgencies in Muslim lands. I believe that a careful study of those events are pertinent for American and European students of global politics today as they attempt to contextualize the challenges to American military might and Western cultural hegemony continuously pulsating onto the global stage from the remote corners of South Asia. A chronicle of 1857 is also useful to understand the fragility of a multicultural society in the...
James Ron: IR Profs Should Teach Religious Fluency
Here is a fabulous interview on Canadian TV with Professor James Ron of Carleton University. Ron's key argument is that we are not giving our students a sufficient education if they leave our classes fluent in human rights discourse but not in the nuts and bolts of the world's leading religions. A real "aha" moment for me as a teacher - sure, I've always tried to make sure they know the difference between Sunni and Shi'a or the difference between an Islamic and a Muslim majority state, or the role of the Holy See at the UN, but Ron's argument goes further: he's not simply saying students...