Faith, violence, and phronesis: narrative identity, rhetorical symbolism, and ritual embodiment in religious communities
- PDF / 497,705 Bytes
- 14 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 92 Downloads / 209 Views
Faith, violence, and phronesis: narrative identity, rhetorical symbolism, and ritual embodiment in religious communities Christina M. Gschwandtner1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This contribution explores the question to what extent religious narratives can move the adherents of religious communities to violence or teach wisdom and compassion, drawing on Ricoeur’s work on narrative, ethics, and biblical interpretation. It lays out Ricoeur’s account of narrative identity, urging him to connect his account of phronesis more fully with his analysis of threefold mimesis in his earlier work. It considers his biblical hermeneutics in light of this work on identity and moral action and suggests that bringing these various dimensions of his work together more fully than he himself does would provide a more substantive account of how identity is shaped in religious contexts. It might on the one hand help us to understand more fully a turn to fundamentalism or religious violence and on the other hand draw more clearly on the phronetic resources within religious traditions, especially as they are expressed in ritual behavior, to combat violence and teach wisdom and compassion. Keywords Faith · Violence · Phronesis · Narrative · Identity · Ritual · Religion The prevalence of what is often called “religious violence,” violent acts that seem precipitated by or at least justified via religious rhetoric, is a concrete and deeply troubling aspect of the contemporary global social imaginary. Sometimes sweeping claims are made about the link between religion and violence, at other times commentators try to distinguish more carefully between “mainstream” religion and religious extremism.1 And often religious leaders are called upon to use the 1 On occasion, such a simplistic account of religion’s involvement with politics is challenged, as in William Cavanaugh’s argument (2009) that a very recent, Western, post-Enlightenment definition of religion as purely personal and private has led to regarding all “religious” violence as irrational, crazy, incoherent, and abhorrent, while “political” violence perpetrated by the nation state is regarded a priori as rational, coherent, and as undertaken only for justified and peaceful ends. He leaves open the question
* Christina M. Gschwandtner [email protected] 1
Philosophy Department, Fordham University, Bronx, NY, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
C. M. Gschwandtner
supposed resources of their own traditions to combat violence-inducing rhetoric or to provide hermeneutic alternatives to extremist religious visions of the world. Do specific religious narratives or their concrete rhetorical interpretations encourage or even compel members of religious communities to acts of violence? Can other narratives—or possibly even the same narratives but with different rhetorical interpretations—instead motivate believers to acts of compassion or peace? How does the forceful hold religion has on a social and political imaginary in many societies—past and present—enable it to elicit peace
Data Loading...
