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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 May 2020
A quarter of a century has passed since the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and the 1995 genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The anniversaries of these tragedies beckon us to reflect on the responsibility of theologians, scholars of religion, and religious educators to confront genocide. How should scholars use the tools of these disciplines to educate about genocide responsibly and promote peace and respect for human dignity and rights in the wake of such tragedy? How might they utilize their intellectual, spiritual, and material resources to help prevent violent extremism and genocide? Four scholars who have profoundly engaged these questions in their academic work generously agreed to contribute to this roundtable. One of them writes directly from his context of Rwanda, while another writes from her homeland in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The two scholars based in the United States have also systematically confronted the problem of ethnic and religious hatred and genocide, focusing on the Holocaust and the Bosnian genocide, respectively. All four contributors serve as remarkable examples of theologians and scholars of religion who have used their training and skills to promote a world where “never again” is not merely a slogan.
1 A best-selling example was Hitchens, Christopher, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2009)Google Scholar.
2 See Gopin, Marc, Holy War, Holy Peace: How Religion Can Bring Peace to the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar, and Lederach, John Paul, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace, reprint (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
3 One excellent and provocative case study is Jardim, Tomaz, The Mauthausen Trial: American Military Justice in Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 See Carroll, James: Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History (Boston: Mariner Books, 2002)Google Scholar, and Nirenberg, David, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014)Google Scholar.
5 See Gerard S. Sloyan, “Christian Persecution of the Jews over the Centuries,” published by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://www.ushmm.org/research/about-the-mandel-center/initiatives/ethics-religion-holocaust/articles-and-resources/christian-persecution-of-jews-over-the-centuries/christian-persecution-of-jews-over-the-centuries.
6 See Barnett, Victoria, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Bergen, Doris, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)Google Scholar; and Ericksen, Robert P., Theologians under Hitler (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.
7 This is the argument made by Steigman-Gall, Richard, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar. Leading scholars debated the question in a special issue of Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 2 (2007).
8 See Barnett, For the Soul of the People, as well as Barnett, Victoria, “Track-Two Diplomacy, 1933–1939: International Responses from Catholics, Jews, and Ecumenical Protestants to Events in Nazi Germany,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 27, no. 1 (2014): 76–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 See Barnett, Victoria, “Seelisberg: An Appreciation,” Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 2, no. 2 (2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, https://doi.org/10.6017/scjr.v2i2.1422, and Christian M. Rutishauser, “The 1947 Seelisberg Conference: The Foundation of the Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 2, no. 2 (2011), https://doi.org/10.6017/scjr.v2i2.1421.
10 There is a large body of this literature on this issue, but one recent anthology covers much of the territory: Cathey, Robert and Procario-Foley, Elena, eds., Righting Relations after the Holocaust and Vatican II: Essay in Honor of John Pawlikowski, OSM (Mahway, NJ: Paulist Press, 2018)Google Scholar.
11 See the two-volume collection of these statements: Sherman, Franklin, ed., Bridges: Documents of the Christian-Jewish Dialogue (New Jersey: The Stimulus Foundation, 2011 and 2015)Google Scholar.
12 See Barnett, Victoria J., “The Creation of Ethical ‘Gray Zones’ in the German Protestant Church: Reflections on the Historical Quest for Ethical Clarity,” in Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise on the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, eds. Petropoulos, Jonathan and Roth, John K. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005)Google Scholar.
13 Robert P. Ericksen, “Christian Complicity? Changing Views on the German Churches and the Holocaust,” US Holocaust Memorial Museum 2007 Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Annual Lecture, https://www.ushmm.org/research/tools/videos-recordings-and-transcripts-of-past-events/past-lectures.
14 Examples of such studies include Afridi, Mehnaz, Shoah through Muslim Eyes (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2016)Google Scholar; Motadel, David, Islam and Nazi Germany's War (Cambridge: Harvard Belknap Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rittner, Carol and Roth, John, Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (Minnesota: Paragon House, 1998)Google Scholar; and Rothberg, Michael, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.