Kazimierz Wielki University, Bydgoszcz (Polen), 20.-22. September 2013: Violence and Apostasy: Conflict as Cause or Side Effect? (original) (raw)
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2004
The attitude of the medieval church towards violence before the First Crusade in 1095 underwent a significant institutional evolution, from the peaceful tradition of the New Testament and the Roman persecution, through the prelate-led military campaigns of the Carolingian period and the Peace of God era. It would be superficially easy to characterize this transformation as the pragmatic and entirely secular response of a growing power to the changing world. However, such a simplification does not fully do justice to the underlying theology. While church leaders from the 5th Century to the 11th had vastly different motivations and circumstances under which to develop their responses to a variety of violent activities, the teachings of Augustine of Hippo provided a unifying theme. Augustine’s just war theology, in establishing which conflicts are acceptable in the eyes of God, focused on determining whether a proper causa belli or basis for war exists, and then whether a legitimate au...
Religious rituals and worship services within the context of violence and war are the topic of this article. It investigates the role of diff erent dimensions of such liturgies and their encouragement and legitimization, but also their delegitimization of war. Th e textual example, on which this article is based, is a small Catholic prayer book for soldiers from World War I. Th e thesis is that liturgy and forms of piety have a very formative character by means of their emotionality and associations, but also through corporeity, repetition, etc. Liturgy and piety can have a great but very diff erent impact on the communication of war and violence. Th e article focuses on some of the central prayers and other texts from this prayer book as concrete examples for the article's argument.
in: Rivista di Storia del Cristianesimo 5 (2008) , 9-28, 2008
In the European tradition, religious violence has manifested itself principally in the guise of three phenomena, martyrdom, holy war, and terror. While this labeling is unproblematic for holy war (inclusive of crusades and confessional wars of religion), that martyrs perpetrate a form of violence and that there inheres a religious component in terror may seem self-evident only to recent observers of very recent history. Without denying the importance of conjuncture and (perhaps) pathology in the occurrences of these phenomena, it is legitimate to try to recover how they made deep sense over the very longue durée of Western history, even across the classic divide separating premodern and «religious» from modern and «secular», across the temporal plane within which theologies morphed into godless ideologies. More precisely, how did these phenomena make deep sense given a theology that has often been labeled pacifist? 2 «Given» has often been translated «despite», the presumption being that an essentially pacifist early Christian ethos was perverted by outside forces -to round up the usual suspects, Constantine's conversion; the warlike barbarian invaders; feudalism; state-building 3 . Obviously it would be a difficult proposition to brush away these factors in a longue-durée history of violence in the Christian world. But «given» can
On Resistance in Churches in 20 th Century Europe
The paper argues that the relationship between Christian values and the choice to resist a regime is not straightforward. As the stream of refugees from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) into neighbouring countries grew stronger, the Polish Catholic Church and the Polish Red Cross actively contributed to provide the shelter needed. At the same time, the Reformed Church of Hungary (in a neighbouring country also facing a considerable inflow of GDR refugees) played a much smaller role, due to its tighter connection with the Communist Regime. When considering the recent upheaval in Ukraine, it has been argued that the country's major Churches, both the Greek Catholic and the Orthodox Church, sided with demonstrators as the government cracked down on the Maidan protests. On the other hand, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate proved more sensitive to Russian political pressure, and condemned the protesters as belonging to “totalitarian sects”. The primary emphasis was placed on the need to consider the specific context in which choices and strategies of compliance/resistance are elaborated and carried out.
Athens journal of history, 2024
The current article is concerned with the dialectics between power, society and religion at a most dramatic period of the English history-the Tudor Reformation, a time when prevalent Catholic ideas were challenged by the new faith creating a conflict which could not be reconciled for centuries. The transition to a new social order took a strongly religious character. The schism triggered a tsunami of violence that permeated and shaped all aspects of life, polity, and culture. In the current article, politico-theological foundations of violence are viewed in historical perspective including both ideology and practice. Making violence a focal point of the research, we study all the means mobilized to justify it as well as mechanisms and venues of propaganda whose aim was to exert influence on people's mind-set.
RESPONDING TO VIOLENCE: LITURGY, AUTHORITY AND SACRED PLACES, c. 900–c. 1150
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 2021
ABSTRACTThe principle that church buildings constitute sacred spaces, set apart from the secular world and its laws, is one of the most enduring legacies of medieval Christianity in the present day. When and how church buildings came to be defined as sacred has consequently received a good deal of attention from modern scholars. What happened when that status was compromised, and ecclesiastical spaces were polluted by acts of violence, like the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral? This paper investigates the history of rites for the reconciliation of holy places violated by the shedding of blood, homicide or other public acts of ‘filthiness’ which followed instances such as Becket's murder. I first identify the late tenth and early eleventh centuries in England as crucial to the development of this rite, before asking why English bishops began to pay attention to rites of reconciliation in the years around 1000 ce. This paper thus offers a fresh perspectiv...